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.
Site News 2009
Sunday, 8th February 2009
- Well, belated Happy New Year - and apologies for all but the main site being offline at the moment. It follows a PHP upgrade on the server this week which has resulted in an unexpected reconfiguration, so it may be some time before I can get it all working again. I'm busy anyway at the minute with preparations for this year's Mangotsfield Village Festival on Saturday, 13th June (put the date in your diary!), so this couldn't have come at a worse time. (Except perhaps last week when my home was in chaos, but that's another story...)
- To add to my troubles this week, some joker decided to inject a load of links into a few of my pages. Thankfully the links didn't actually appear (which proves that whoever did it is an idiot), but the code screwed with my layout a little and may have increased page access times. I've now restored the original pages, so I hope that's an end to it.
Wednesday, 11th February 2009
- Good news - all the Lyndenlea websites are now back online! The technical glitch wasn't as difficult to solve as I'd feared, just inconvenient. By the way, my promised "big update" to the Lyndenlea Bells site is STILL in progress (honest!) and will hopefully be published by the end of this month. Stay tuned...
Tuesday, 3rd March 2009
- At last, after literally months of work, I've published that long-awaited update to the Lyndenlea Bells site. In addition to the site-specific changes it's also meant background changes to some of the files common to all sites (which made last month's technical glitch even trickier to fix), not least the various navigation features. I have a relatively long list of things still to be done, so 2009 promises to be a busy year for the Lyndenlea websites!
- One other small tweak you might have spotted - to make these news bulletins easier to read I've put an almost-half-line gap between each item, both under "Latest Site News" on the Home page and in the Site News Archive. It hopefully shouldn't detract too much from the one-line gap already between the domain-wide and site-specific news, but I may adjust the spacings later on if they prove too similar.
Wednesday, 4th March 2009
- Just a couple of changes today. First of all, I've updated the opening page of the About The Websites section as I'm now using Firefox 3 to check my code (and have been since support for Firefox 2 ended); and secondly, the Accessibilty page in the same section now includes a paragraph explaining my decision NOT to claim conformance to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, even though my websites are easily up to the Level Triple-A standard. Take a look to find out why!
Tuesday, 24th March 2009
- Introducing the latest addition to the Lyndenlea websites: Queens On A Chessboard! It offers a fascinating insight into an age-old logic puzzle, along with a few new angles courtesy of my Dad, Colin and me. If you have any interest in numbers and puzzles (or even chess), I recommend you take a look.
- I've also made some small adjustments to the footer (the bit below the main content) of each page to make sure it doesn't overflow into the Dynamic Site Menu. The Powered by PHP icon has gone, and on pages that are covered by a Creative Commons licence there are one or two new forced line breaks in the licence text.
Thursday, 2nd April 2009
- Google continues to inflict their immense wisdom upon us. In their latest move they've decided to track people around the Internet using the AdSense adverts on websites like this one, and automatically add them to various categories so they can better target their advertising. Quite frankly I'm not impressed, so in response (or is it disgust?) I've removed the Google search facility from the Lyndenlea websites. According to my visitor logs it wasn't used much anyway, but if you do happen to get completely lost there's still always the Site Map to rescue you.
- In other news, I've decided that my links to external websites (i.e. those that take you away from Lyndenlea) aren't sufficiently obvious, not least as they now all open in the same window by default, so I've started adding a little icon to each one to clearly identify them. The Lyndenlea Online and Queens sites are so far the only ones to have all of their external links updated, but the other two sites will get the same treatment as time allows. I'll keep you informed of progress, of course.
- Following the changes detailed above, I've updated the appropriate pages of the About The Websites section accordingly.
Tuesday, 16th June 2009
- Well, unfortunately it's taken me over two months to spot, but it seems my brilliant "external link" icons don't work properly in Internet Explorer (darn Microsoft...). I feel a little better, however, knowing that Wikipedia (from whom I borrowed the idea in the first place) suffers the same problem. Nevertheless, a feature that doesn't work properly isn't a feature I want on my websites, so I've swapped the icons for italic text. Not quite as pretty, but it's entirely cross-browser compatible and should still make the external links stand out.
- While I was doing that, I decided to mark-up the external links on my personal site as well, so there's now just the Lyndenlea Bells site left to do.
- Of course, the Accessibility page has been updated to reflect the change from icons to italic text to mark external links.
Monday, 21st September 2009
- Just a few changes this time, but there are lots more still to come. I've fixed the footer to make it fit better on small-screen devices, and I've marked-up the few external links in the Site News Archive for 2008 that quite honestly I'd forgotten were even there.
Tuesday, 22nd September 2009
- You'll hopefully be pleased to know that I've finally marked-up all of the external links on the Lyndenlea Bells site. Assuming I haven't missed any that should have been the last of them, so you can now be confident that all links to non-Lyndenlea websites will be displayed in italic text. If you spot any that I've missed, though, please do let me know via the Feedback page so I can update them.
Tuesday, 13th October 2009
- I've always strongly resisted adding a CAPTCHA or similar Turing test to my websites' Feedback pages, mainly for reasons of accessibility. Unfortunately, spam continues to be a problem with more than 170 such emails being sent through these websites since May 2008. I'd very much like to make it stop, but just for now I'll settle for keeping a closer eye on it. To that end, whenever someone sends me email via the Feedback page it will now include their computer's current public IP address and hostname. If it turns out that all the spam is coming from the same computer (sadly very unlikely) then I can easily block it; otherwise, maybe I'll at least have a bit more information about whoever's behind it.
- In happier news, I've improved the Other Lyndenlea websites drop-down menu in the top corner of each page to make better use of the space that the search box used to occupy, and added a link to a brand new Site Index page on the main site. I felt that while the drop-down menu gives easy access to each site it doesn't give new visitors any idea about what those sites have to offer, so the new page is intended to fulfill that requirement.
- The new Site Index page can be found in the About the Websites section. I've made a couple of other tweaks to the opening page of that section too, including noting the fact that I now use Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (alongside IE6 as always) to check my websites before publication.
Sunday, 1st November 2009
- For once I was pleased to receive no less than 28 spam emails from my websites in one day because they all included the spammer's IP address. As you'll know from the news bulletin on 13th October 2009 I've been keeping an eye on those pesky spammers, but now I'm biting back. I've set up a blacklist of all the IP addresses they've been using, and any attempt to access my websites from one of those IP addresses will now be faced with an "Access Forbidden" message. Job done!
Monday, 2nd November 2009
- And so the game of cat-and-mouse begins... I've already had to add another IP address to my blacklist, but hopefully the spam I received early this morning wasn't a direct result of yesterday's news bulletin. For the more IT-minded, there are two distinct subnets in the list of IP addresses so far, so I'm not ruling out blocking those entire subnets rather than just individual IP addresses. I'll keep you updated with progress, of course.
Saturday, 7th November 2009
- Whilst writing an email to me about my websites earlier this week my Dad inadvertently spotted some news missing from the Site News Archive on the Queens On A Chessboard site. It turns out that the same minor code error would have affected the first Site News Archive page on any future Lyndenlea website too, but not on sites that existed before I added the Site News feature. Anyway, I've now fixed it, and while I was there I also updated the code behind the list of links to previous years' news (which doesn't yet appear in the Queens site's Archive because it wasn't launched until this year) to better cope with different screen widths.
- After almost two years I've decided to swap around the Latest Site News so that the most recent bulletin appears last, the same as in the Site News Archive. It just makes more sense that way around. This feature otherwise continues to work in exactly the same way that it always has, showing the most recent news bulletin along with any other bulletins that were published in the preceding seven days.
