You may have noticed a strange new login box appear on the homepage over the past couple weeks, and if you’ve been wondering what it’s all about, then hopefully this will put those thoughts to rest!

Currently only a couple of features exist once you login, even though the plan is to increase these and make the site a whole lot more user orientated. It’s fine for anyone to sign up, snoop around and everything else, but you’ll have to bear in mind it’s still in beta - probably alpha is the better term! - and so its quite bare bones, and some stuff ultimately wont work the way it’s meant to!

Keep an eye out on the site to hopefully see more updates over the next few weeks!…

I’m not sure if this is comparable to Myles‘ Kingston University network outage incident of 2006, but it must come close…

Last night while investigating my databases within my site’s admin area, I happened to click on a button entitled ‘Check DB’, expecting to find some sort of lovely report about the health / condition of my database. However, this was not the case, and found my site broken… as it would have seemed I corrupted my databases…

…after making a support request the issue was thankfully resolved after a few hours, however I later found out my faux pas was more wide spread than previously thought, and I had actually taken down everyone’s databases and emails on my entire server, which I’m guessing is quite a few…

Last night I added a newly updated photography section to the site. Previously, each photo and each album had to be created manually, and was a time consuming task. Due to me also uploading photos I take to my Flickr account, dealing with the same photos twice was repetative and to an extent a waste.

So, the new section now allows photos I upload to Flickr show on my website, in their own albums, with comments and camera settings data automatically. As well as being more efficient for me to manage my photos online, it will also make my photography section more up to date, as I reguarly use Flickr for my photography, and will add additional features to the site, such as photo commenting.

Photography Section: www.lloydengland.com/photography or click the Photography link in the navigation bar at the top of every page.

So, as you may have noticed, the website has had a few changes here and there to bring a fresh new change to some sections, and hopefully improve the website as a whole.

A change to the blog area as you may notice below, is a newly designed commenting section, as shown to the right. All comments are now shown grouped together spanning the entire width of the page at the bottom underneath every post on each individual post page. To go along with this change, a new range of commenting guidelines have been placed on the page to provide guidance and help when posting replies.

Each individual post page now also featured a comprehensive guide on the left hand side, providing information, published date information, tag categories, post rss feeds and other basic information.

Another large scale update was with the Photography section on the main website. The section now features galleries to specific locations and subjects, which then include a mimimun of eight photos for each, all with larger versions, and breadcrumbs for easy and simple navigation.

Currently only three galleries exist, but more will be added in due course to make this section a more fundamental part of the website itself.

The site has also had many smaller make overs, and the layout of all pages have been tweaked and improved. The profile page has also been rewritten and now includes a downloadable micro version of my CV. Some bugs have also been fixed and the site should work better in FireFox now than before.

Continuing on from my previous post, further updates have been rolled out since. 

The gallery has been given it’s biggest update since it was included in the site nearly two years ago, with an entirely new version being uploaded and replacing the old gallery, starting from scratch.

New albums have been added, and most have new photos which could not be included up until now due to previous technical constraints, now hosting over 1000 photos from various events, occasions and locations.

You can access the gallery by clicking the link to the right, or by clicking here

The gallery now is pretty extensive, and will hopefully be updated as and when needed, hopefully you’ll enjoy exploring it!

Recently I’ve been starting to update some areas of the website, so far mostly the blog and gallery.

Parts of the gallery are currently unavaliable following a large scale update, namely the entire America Photos section, as well as some odds and ends, but these hopefully should be restored within the next week at the latest.

The blog itself may also appear to be displayed broken and look different every so often, while I’m trying to update certain areas, but the functionality during these periods should remain fine.

Updates So Far;

Tag Cloud - Replacing the category list on the right hand side is now a Tag Cloud, displaying each category according to size and colour, depending on how many topics are in each. (eg. The more posts in an individual category, the darker and larger it will appear, and visa versa.)

Recent Posts - Again, on the right hand side, an easy to read list of the most recent posts.

So, after further exploring the depths of the inter-web and all it’s glory, I came across a website which basically finds out how much your website (or any website for that matter) is worth.

The site works out the sum by a number of different factors, such as how old is the web address, the rank in search engines such as Google and how many pages of your site it knows about, how many other websites link to yours, daily visitor traffic and even how well your website is coded by checking the validity of the HTML Code and such…

 So, what did it come up with?…

Well, apparently my website, www.lloydengland.com, is worth $509 aka £263.72p and if I wanted too, apparently could sell adverts on my site for $5 (£2.59) each per month! When taking into account that up until now I’ve spent about £50 on my website in total (that includes the .com and hosting up until now) - if I happened to want to sell it to some random person who I happened to find who is also called Lloyd England (or strangely wanted lloydengland.com) I could make a nice little profit!

However, my joint venture abc1 site www.abc1uk.co.uk is on the other hand worth $233 (£120.62), so not as much as my persoal website - but still!

Anyways, the site in question with all these amazing figures is www.dnscoop.com. (Currency conversion - 1 GBP = 1.93010 USD)

Every time I come on here and write a blog post I am faced with a line of ‘drafts’. Blog posts which never quite made it to being published for whatever reason. They’re there, all huddled together in a dusty corner of a server rack - waiting to be posted… waiting to be shown the light of day… but… the chances are slim, and if they were people they would know it! So, lets get that feather duster and lets have a quick glance at the posts which you never did see….

 First, there’s post number 13, or at least what would have been my 13th post, no I’m not that superstitious… that would have been posted but it was just never was. So, June 27th 2005 was the first and last day that my 13th post entitled ‘Pondering’ survived…

Secondly, ‘The What If Machine’, written on 30th November 2005, yet again never saw the light of day… what if it had been posted? (See what I did there in my all amazingness way?) Well… one day a blog along this topic still might occur… might…! So keep your eyes peeled!

The blog post solely titled ‘Post #35′ comes in third… it was never even given a name!

Then follows a string of posts all written while in America last year, none of which were ever privileged enough to be given the publish treatment, one by one called; ‘For the wrong reasons?’, ‘It’s all good folks!’, ‘3000 miles away and it’s only just getting started’, ‘My Last Week’ and finally, ‘Sunday’.

And last but not least, ‘The parcel that never arrives’, written only a few hours ago in fact! What about? Well… parcels of course… what else would it be?

It’s up to you to ponder what they’re all about… hey! What if one was about you? Maybe Post #35 was… but… how would you know? Come on! I’m not that strange honest - they weren’t all written for the wrong reasons, some were truly all good folks… it’s just when the time came it just didn’t happen, maybe somewhere 3000 miles away it’s all just getting started and it may all happen again? From every Sunday to every Last Week - all over again - well - we can dream can’t we? Sometimes that parcel truly does never arrive…

Well it took over a day, but the website’s move to a new host and server is complete at last. After a few problems were over come and sorted, it was just a case of waiting while I uploaded my entire site to the new server in Linux’s crazy compression format and wait for for it to extract all the files to where they were meant to be!

So, if you had come across my amazingly cool and hip maintenance message over the past day you now know why! Hopefully everything should be working as it should - and other than yesterday and today, you shouldn’t even notice any changes! I get a bit less for my buck now, but its pretty decent and will do everything I need (for now!)

At the same time I also renewed my .com address for a further two years as it was due to expire in the next few weeks! So hopefully long live the site!

In other news (kinda), I’ve started to fix the problem with the gallery, it now looks a bit better than it did the other day, but still not 100% - I’ll keep trying to fix it though over the next few days.

Well, it’s been four years and now the time has come to say goodbye to my web host! Elixant, the company which host my website are closing down in March, and for the first time my portfolio’s site’s history - its going to have to move…

So, a little recolecting; I was with the Elixant team from the very start of thier company back in 2002 when I was priviledged enough to be given a free hosting account. Since then they’ve become a paid only hosting company, but in that time they have still given me the same support and service as if I were a paying customer (Even though I recently paid to increase my disk space!). But now due to thier own commitments they have decided to close it down to give them more time for thier studies.

And so this is it, I’m on the hunt for a new hosting provider, one which is Linux and has SQL databases! (And not a 100% requirement, but I do like Cpanel ) So, if anyone knows of any companies which are cheap and decent - tell me please!

I’ve been looking at WebFusion - (http://www.webfusion.co.uk/hosting/fusion-professional-linux/) which is £7.46 a month (thier cheapest with a MySQL database… but with diskspace at 3GB and monthly bandwidth at 25GB… I would never use anywhere near that… so I’m thinking it maybe a waste of money.

My current hosting account gives me;

Linux, 1GB diskspace, (not sure how much bandwidth - but I’ve only used 160MB this month so far so…(even though I’ve known it to rise to around 500MB+ on busy months)), 10 sub domains (even though I only use 1), 10 MySQL databases (30MB), unlimited email, Cpanel!

So, something similar to that would be great Wish me luck hunting!