Recent Changes, and Things Yet To Come

Well, as you can tell, I have a number of things to do to improve the site. The major problem -- the interface was cheesy and kludgey, hard to navigate and it looked kinda juvenile to me -- is solved by redesigning it all, and I am fond of the left-hand navbar look, so that's nice. So now that that's done, I can start working on the content improvements. If you have an idea for something I could add to make the site better or more useful, by all means, please feel free to email it to me.

Recent Changes:

• Converted everything to use Cascading Style Sheets. Probably no one but me cares about this one, but it really does make the site a lot prettier and easier to maintain, and it also makes my HTML code more portable into the future. And I think it's more accessible now, too, for people using aural web browsers and so on.
• Fixed the BBS again. I broke it accidentally while trying to clean up some spam (ugh), so it was posting things but never actually updating the index page. New posts are showing up now.
• Fixed the BBS... it was missing all of the old posts and looked lonely. So I manually downloaded all of the July postings (click, right click, Save As, Save, Back, click, right click, Save As, Save... ad nauseum) and manipulated the index to include them. Yay!
• Upgraded the entire interface, adding the left-hand navbar, and made the bubble graphic much less obnoxious. Still need a logo, but I'd like to stay away from images to keep the pages a speedy download.
• Moved the server back out of house! It was nice to have it in house (over my DSL connection) but things were flaky and the upload speed slow, so it was s-l-o-w to browse during busy times (e.g., evenings). So I got a new account at warped.com web hosting, and transferred everything back over to that. Things are much improved now.
• Redid the gallery images, optimizing them for web browsers, so that the gallery index page and the individual images should load much more quickly now. Also, I should push much less bandwidth over my web hosting account. =)
• I've started work database-izing the suppliers pages. Once that's done, the suppliers pages will be much easier to keep up to date, and I'll be able to allow people to rate the links or update them more easily. That's going to take a lot of coding effort though, so I'm not entirely sure when I'll be done.

To Do:

• Check Links list for dead links
• Add new links to Links list... have a whole stockpile I need to add.
• Add new suppliers to Suppliers list. Likewise, a year of suppliers to add.
• Improve Glossary wording
• Add "So You Wanna Be A Soapmaker" getting-started guide
• Take another round of photos of making CP, some better ones this time
• Photograph a batch of CSDBHP
• Photograph a batch of m&p
• Finish Book Reviews section
• Add all of my recipes to the recipes section