Site History
From my blog
2001/10/29
Minor change to zopemir.py : If a file gets manually deleted from a synched directory, it should be synched next time. Added code for that.
2001/10/28
PHP installation has some trouble : Around 5pm EST, I saw that PHP scripts on my site has suddenly started having problems with getting variable values passed through QUERY_STRING. Informed CSoft.net support guys, so it should be fixed quite soon. In the meanwhile, the printer-friendly, feedback form and the album pages will not work. Well, apparently that was a bug in Apache. Csoft.net guys downgraded Apache and it is fixed now (7pm). Super service, for a personal site, on a Sunday evening.
Removed the "Exit Site" gateway : For 2 weeks, this site featured a delay page that informed people they are leaving this site - like you see in US Government's sites. Along with links that open a new browser window, I'm convinced that this is a seriously annoying usability issue :-)
2001/10/15
Photos from my trip to India : Added 16 photographs from my trip to India on Aug/Sep 2001.
New weblog : A new weblog is added, using Gadfly as the database and some SQL methods in Zope.
2001/10/11
Small design changes : Switched to a Georgia font family from Trebuchet MS. Upgraded Zope to 2.4.1. Added a small icon to show links to external sites. No more popup windows while navigating to external sites.
2001/07/25
New domain name : Good folks at CSoft registered the domain vsbabu.org to solve my DNS problems. As far as I'm concerned, they are #1 in customer support and keeping me (customer) delighted - not just happy.
2001/07/15
Moved to new server : Good folks at Csoft moved my site to a new OpenBSD server. The new address will be vsbabu.csoft.net or resin.csoft.net/~vsbabu. easy.to/babu is re-pointed to the new one!
2001/04/29
Site redesign
:
Redesigned once more. It is little more older-browser friendly now. Liberal application of white space. Less complicated tables. Soothing colors (I think). The old design is shown here. Since my site is mainly textual, it was getting more and more difficult to read it sandwitched between two columns. Also, I grew out of the experiment of non-white background.
2001/04/21
RSYNC problem solved
:
Last week, Csoft moved my account to another server which didn't have rsync. Then they installed rsync in /usr/local/bin/. However, that was not there in the ssh PATH, so had to finally go through rsync options' list. Found out that I can use --rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync.
2001/04/08
Cosmetic changes to the site : Some minor changes to the site. I'm not a thankless guy, so there is a button bar at the bottom to thank the great Open Source software that made this site possible.
Webtrends Live : Installed Webtrends Live reporting. Looks like my site is getting quite a few hits. So, I'm interested in getting little more in-depth reports. Read the privacy policy if you are scared.
2001/03/30
No more counter : The counter is taken out. Many people go directly into the pages, rather than coming through home page. Also, I got better log analysis than that :-)
2001/03/12
Recreated the photo album : Photo album is now powered by Gadfly and some simple Zope DTML. This time it should be easy to update too.
2001/03/08
Minor design change : Changed the stylesheet to use Trebuchet as the generic font. I think it is more soothing on the eyes. Added 3 links to the footer. Some users did not get the idea of the icons at the top.
2001/02/19
Beware! You are being logged :-) : I've installed StatIt V 2.3a by Helge Orthmann www.otterware.de to log the page hits. It is really easy to install and a well written program. Quite more useful than I-need-IE-to-work Webtrends Live . Though I must say that Webtrends Live is a lot more suit/strategist/analyst/PowerPoint friendly - if you want to know who comes to your site, Helge's software is good enough. If you want to outsource logging and reporting and has to talk for hours about logging, go to Webtrends Live. Don't worry, your privacy is not invaded upon. This software collects only what your browser sends - like the browser version, screen resolution, where you came from etc...
DNS Problems Again : The site was inaccissible often since Feb 8th, at vsbabu.csoft.net due to some upgrades at csoft.net servers. After some emails to csoft admins, it is back up now. One good thing about csoft guys are they actually solve problems in minutes and then e-mails me back that it is solved. For the kind of money that they charge ($5/month), this is super service when compared to super-mega-corporate hosting providers I encounter in my professional life.
2001/01/23
Site redesigned : The site is redesigned again! The old guest book entries are back up. The font sizes for content are no longer fixed. Numerous other enhancements. I've given up on making this Netscape 4 compliant. The code is cleaned up a bit and so, it should help me move to XHTML quickly. I will soon put up python scripts that pull stuff out of Zope and puts it here regularly as a static site.
2000/11/13
Site moves out of Zope : This site was moved from one machine running Zope to another which doesn't :-) Zope was using up lot of memory on the server. Thanks to CSoft guys for putting up with that for so long. So, this is still in the process of getting converted from 100% dynamic to 99% static one! I'll've to go back to PHP to do dynamic stuff. Printable Page is not functioning yet. I need to make a PHP version of guest book and photo album too.
2000/09/04
Stylesheet spruced up : The new design does not work well when the font sizes are changed in the browser. So, I had to fix the font size to 12px. I hate doing that. People should be able to view a site in any font they want to. On the plus side, I guess 12px is big enough for most people to read :-) I'll work on incorporating variable size fonts soon.
DNS Problem solved : This site was not available under vsbabu.csoft.net since Aug 18th. The great guys at Csoft.net fixed it today. For future convenience I also registered a V3 domain easy.to/babu which you can bookmark.
2000/09/02
Site Redesign : A major redesign, inspired by hazard area theme at weblogs.userland.com. The template uses only one image, the curve on the left and rest of it is using CSS, text and colors. Motivation? Well, I'm sick of designers insisting that all navigation links and almost any design element should be a graphic - and some of them even have entire page made as an image. Crap!
1998 - 2000
I first made the site using GNU/m4. I used m4, mainly because, I could define sitewide defaults. The second version used PHP3. PHP was mainly for getting user feedback and also to provide users with their choice of web page themes.
Then, I used Zope
as a site builder tool, then generate
static web site from Zope database and upload the site.