Site News Archive

In this archive you'll find all of the Site News published on the Home page of this website since its launch. Everything archived here relates either to all of the Lyndenlea websites, or just to this site in particular. For Site News specific to another Lyndenlea website please see the Site News Archive on that site. Note that the archive is arranged in chronological order, so the most recent news in a particular year can be found at the end of the page.

• 2004
• 2005
• 2006
• 2007
• 2008
• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012
• 2013
• 2014
• 2015
• 2016
• 2017
• 2018
• 2019
• 2020

Site News 2008

Thursday, 24th January 2008

• I've made a couple of changes to the Dynamic Site Menu. First of all, you'll see that the pages in the Home section (currently Feedback, Privacy Statement, Site Map and Site News Archive) have been moved into the menu structure. However, unlike the other sections in the menu, the Home section will always remain expanded wherever you are in the site, so you'll always have quick and easy access to the pages within it.
• Secondly, it seems Google have inexplicably retired their AdSense referral scheme for websites outside of North America, Latin America and Japan, so I've removed the AdSense referral button from below the Dynamic Site Menu.
• The Accessibility and Navigation pages in The Websites section have been updated to reflect recent changes to the websites, including those detailed above, but most notably the fact that all links should now open by default in the current browser window or tab.

Thursday, 28th February 2008

• As much as I hate to bring bad news, I'm afraid I must announce the forthcoming closure of the Lyndenlea Genealogy website on Sunday, 30th March 2008. The reasons behind this difficult decision are explained more fully on the site's Home page.
• On a lighter note, I've decided to rename the main Lyndenlea website Lyndenlea Online. I felt that the site needed something more than simply "Lyndenlea" to set it apart from the other websites here, while still allowing it to retain its position as the "main" Lyndenlea site. I hope I've achieved that without causing too much confusion!
• Finally for this update, I've tweaked the colour schemes of each website (except for the Lyndenlea Genealogy site, for obvious reasons) to bring them into line with the W3C's forthcoming Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. For more information on these tweaks and on WCAG 2.0 in general, see the Accessibility page in The Websites section of the Lyndenlea Online site.

Thursday, 3rd April 2008

• It was a few days late, but I've now finally closed the Lyndenlea Genealogy website. Sadly, nobody contacted me with a view to taking over the site, but Alan Ward's copy of his original Bristol Family History Research Guide (the predecessor of my own site) is still being maintained occasionally.
  Please note that although the above link was alive on the date of this news bulletin, I can accept no responsibility for its current availability.
• On a much lighter note, I've greatly simplified and improved the Feedback page to make it easier for you to send me your comments, should you wish to do so.
• I've also slightly amended the Privacy Statement to reflect the fact that I may now collect personally identifiable information from you (if you choose to provide it) at various points throughout the Lyndenlea websites, not just via the Feedback page.

Friday, 25th April 2008

• I've tidied up and slightly improved the code behind the "Latest Site News" feature on each site's Home page. Any increase in loading speed will probably be negligible, but it made me feel better.

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

• Just a small tweak this time, to remove the "Skip to" links from the top of the page when printing.

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

• Another small tweak - it turns out that the XHTML code behind the Dynamic Site Menu was invalid(!), so I've corrected it using The W3C Markup Validation Service. Sincere apologies for this lapse in my otherwise immaculate code standards - it won't happen again.

Friday, 29th August 2008

• I seem to be in bug-finding mode this week. During testing for yet another small tweak, I found that the redirection from the old lindenlea.info domain to the current lyndenlea.info domain (note the slight difference in spelling) was in almost every case no longer working. The problem appears to be on the server, and I am currently in dialogue with my Web hosting company to try to resolve it.
• Following on from Wednesday's foray to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site (see the previous news bulletin) I've switched to using local copies of the three W3C icons at the end of each page, rather than referencing those on the W3C server as they originally advised. My pages should now load a little quicker as a result, and to be honest I'm happier to be pulling in less resources from remote servers every time.
• On a related note, I've updated the link URI of the W3C CSS icon to automatically validate each page's CSS, much as the W3C XHTML 1.0 icon does.

Saturday, 30th August 2008

• Great news! After a brief dialogue with my Web hosting company, the domain redirection is now back in full working order. Hopefully by now everyone should be using the lyndenlea.info domain anyway, but it's nice to keep hold of the odd visitor who has still not updated their bookmarks, or has simply not popped by for a while. If you're among the latter, welcome back!

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

• About this time last year I started making these news bulletins longer and more informal. Unfortunately, this resulted in a dramatic increase in the size of the single "news" file in which I've been keeping them all since I implemented the Site News feature back in mid-2004. Of course, it could only get worse, even if I decided to return to those boring one-line items, so I've separated the news bulletins into multiple files - one for each year - and improved all of the code behind it. You should notice an immediate increase in loading speed of both the Home page and the Site News Archive on each site, and I can continue waxing lyrical in my occasional news bulletins. Everyone's a winner!

Monday, 8th September 2008

• In addition to a plethora of behind-the-scenes updates to various bits of code that will probably make very little difference to anyone except me, I've added a new link to accompany the icons at the bottom of the page. It points to the explanatory pages on the Lyndenlea Online site, and provides what I feel to be a necessary shortcut to the all-important Accessibility page from whichever Lyndenlea website you happen to be browsing.
• Many of the behind-the-scenes updates involved the website statistics I've been collecting for just over a year, so I took the opportunity to remove the All Years view of visitor numbers from the Statistics page (under The Websites). Generating the numbers for all years involved reading every single log file available which, like the single "news" file that I recently retired (see the previous news bulletin), would only get worse as the months elapsed, so I'm afraid you'll just have to make do with the yearly totals. These do of course read up to twelve log files per site (one for each month), but while that's still a big number, at least it's finite.

Tuesday, 9th September 2008

• I've made a few essential changes to the XHTML code behind the Site Map. Yes, it uses very similar code to the Dynamic Site Menu, and I forgot to check it when I fixed the menu a fortnight ago...

Thursday, 9th October 2008

• After a month of work, I am happy to announce a number of improvements to the Lyndenlea websites. The most wide-ranging of these can be found at the bottom of each page: I've added a "Return to Top" link that takes you back to the beginning of the main content, and whilst adding support for a new copyright licence that now applies to the majority of pages, I ended up rewriting the entire footer! More information on this licence can be found on the new Policies page (in the Home section) - this page also includes a new Disclaimer (admittedly more for my benefit than yours), and the updated Privacy Statement has been moved there too.
• Another brand new page offers a number of Display Options to allow you to customise various aspects of the Lyndenlea websites. The much-improved controls for hiding and reinstating the Dynamic Site Menu can now be found here, if you were wondering where they'd gone. Most of the options were provided to improve the accessibility of the websites, but they're fun to play with too.
• As well as these improvements, I've also made an enormous number of changes "behind the scenes" to the PHP and XHTML code. For instance, the title of each page that appears at the top of the main content is now handled by just one piece of code, rather than having multiple bits of essentially the same code on each site. And where multi-part pages have a list of links to the various parts just below the title, the code behind those links has been significantly improved. Many more updates to the individual websites here at Lyndenlea are on their way, so stay tuned!
• In fact, some updates have already been made to the Lyndenlea Online site, including some small improvements to the Home page. The About The Websites section (note its slightly better name) has been updated to reflect all the changes outlined above; and the Immortalised In Verse section (formerly named simply "The Poem") has been totally rewritten, with its original page split into two and a brand new page added, complete with a "fruity" photo.

Friday, 10th October 2008

• With such a big update, and with me publishing it so late in the evening, it was bound to happen. I forgot to upload the licence icons. But never mind, they're up now - I don't think I missed anything else. I'll be taking a break from the websites over the weekend, but on Monday I'll get straight back into it and make a start on the next big update, this time to the Lyndenlea Bells site.

Thursday, 23rd October 2008

• The licence icons weren't all I forgot on 9th October. I've now updated the error page (not that it's really ever seen, thankfully), and made a tweak to the code behind the Feedback page to allow them both to share the same HTML form. I'll be making further rationalisations later on as both pages use a lot more very similar code, but right now it's rather late in the evening...

Friday, 24th October 2008

• On reflection, having examined the code behind both the error and Feedback pages, I've decided to leave them as they are. While both pages' code is indeed very similar, there are also important differences which could potentially slow down processing in the long run.
• And for those of you wondering about my promised "big update" to the Lyndenlea Bells site... I admit I've been a bit sidetracked recently so it's not progressing anything like as quickly as I'd hoped. It WILL happen, though, you can be assured of that!
• (What's this? A news bulletin with NO ACTUAL UPDATES?! Must be a first for me! I'd better watch out that this doesn't start turning into a blog...)