Changes to the website…

You might have noticed that the site has had a bit of a facelife. For a while now I’ve been meaning to give it an overhaul, and make it easier to update.

Things I’ve done:

  • Made templates wider.
  • Used amazon web services to get keywork and browse based item links
  • Added google ads at the bottom of the page
  • Created my own PHP base web service (using NuSOAP) to allow me to write a .Net application to manage my walks and blog posts (Moveable Type API) (this is partially completed – walks are done – blogs aren’t).
  • Created above noted app for managing walks database, written in .Net with some nice looking custom controls.

Things still need to be done:

  • I’d love to make the whole site run off one template – at the moment its 4, 1 in Dreamweaver for the walks, 1 for the index page and 1 each for the category and article pages.
  • Complete the above .Net application to cover blog editing
  • Add some caching to the above app, as at the moment it pulls a big list from the web each time it starts and slows everything down, probably churning my bandwidth as well)
  • Maybe improve the amazon keyword searches based on some info from each post – might be interesting :D

I think I’ll share some of the stuff I’m doing above later, specifically the .Net MoveableType class library and the amazon php soap client code, but both need a bit of tidying up first (especially the MoveableType bit).