Me and My Website
This is my space to play, enjoy, experiment and learn. I'm a novice website builder having a good time with the internet and my little website. This site is nothing special but it has changed and improved over the months and I'm happy with it for now. I expect it to keep changing as I learn more and experiment with layouts and designs.
email me at dalp@dalp.890m.com
Latest Interest
Multimedia Display
I wanted to add some Youtube videos to my site and was having difficulty making up my mind how to do so. Should I just embed the Youtube code on the page or try something a little more adventurous? I eventually decided to just use what I've already got - Shadowbox. I had only used it for images but it can do more than that and has worked out great for the videos.
Recent Interest
Content Mangement Systems
These have caught my attention and I'm intrigued. I've seen loads of Word Press sites but never really understood what the whole concept was about until recently. Did a little bit of reading and decided to take the plunge. Wow! These things are great! I have chosen Joomla! to get started with and it's fascinating how flexible and powerful it is. I have installed the 1.5.5 release here (updated to 1.5.9). My hosts here have an autoinstaller for various scripts but the version of Joomla is old so to get the latest I had to do a manual install which obviously required some research, but wasn't difficult. The quantity and quality of guides and tutorials that are available, particularly form joomla.org, made it a relatively simple task. Now that I've got it up and running I need to organise some content so I can have a decent play and investigate it's workings and capabilities. I didn't install the sample data so I'm building up from scratch.
I expect to soon be installing Word Press and seeing how that works but I'm trying not to do too many things at once.
Being a Linux fan boy I love open source and CMS is another area where the movement excels.
Previous Interests
Flash
I've recently added a flash intro to the the site. I've seen this on other websites and thought it looked good so I made one for me. It's nothing special or even original, being made from a template, but I think it looks ok and I'm happy with it for now. No doubt I will change it at some point. I will probably spend some time playing with this technology and might add some flash content as well. I have noticed that this can be annoying to a viewer so I will have to use it moderately and tastefully.
Galleries
I've been looking at various ways to present a gallery. I'm no photographer but thousands of other people put loads of boring photos on the net so I'm going to make my contribution to the millions of tedious images out there. I'll keep them original and only use photos taken by myself or members of my family, but to present them I'm going to use the talents of others.
I've made a start and have decided to use Shadowbox.js Media Viewer - by M.J.I.Jackson . The author gives credit to his sources of inspiration and his skill and hard work has produced a great way of displaying a range of media without changing page. I've used Shadowbox for my photos but for the desktop images on my GNU/Linux page I've used Lightbox 2 - by Lokesh Dhakar.