A long time in the coming, I'm delighted to announce I've got a whole new couple of pages on the site. First up is the links page. This is what the old beast used to look like. I'd invite you to head over to the new page and take a look around. I've spent hours looking over this baby, so I hope it's far more usable.

Next up is a totally re-written About page. I'm often asked who I am, and the old page frankly sucked in comparison to the new. There's a page of facts, and also an official bio (I've had to compile a couple recently so I've stuck with one) which Matt Holland has used in my Gleamd entry! I've also now enabled comments on my 'About' page, so if people want to discuss anything on there, they can do so! Enjoy.

One continual usabilty issue I've had to cope with recently is my archive. To date, and including this post, I've blogged 411 times. As a result, the archives are somewhat large - back to October 2005 - and this has had a few things to think about. I hate clutter - and I especially hate the fact that the archives got so long and ruined the look of pages with short entries. So, I hid the archives entirely. I've been looking for some cool Javascript effect to hide and show the archives. I settled on scriptaculous and I have to say, I've been blown away at how relatively straight forward it has been to integrate this accordion like effect. It even works in IE 7 (thanks Larry!).

I'm thrilled at having the archives return, and hope you like their re-integration into the site - just don't spend too long toggling them continually in awe of the powers of Javascript (I did).

Tags: Archives

I've spent the last half a day or so MASSIVELY re-working bits and bobs of the site. Firstly there's page loading times. I've moved things that were on subdomains (such as media.nikfletcher.com) and placed them in the domain root (they load faster in my quite extensive testing).

As you may have noticed, I'm linking to Amazon via their referrals scheme more and more now. Instead of solely text ads, I've placed a single graphical ad in the blog sidebar. It's chosen *almost* at random. By 'almost' I mean that it's chosen from a database of ads that I've gone into Associates and manually generated. All the ads are created by me to run (hence why you'll find iPod ads, Harry Potter, 24 and CDs all in there). It's random in that a PHP script serves it up from this 'preapproved' (or as it were 'endorsed') database of ads. If you ever want to see exactly what I'm running (and I intend to update it semi-frquently), the complete database can be viewed here. Pretty much every ad is for a product I own and vouch for. Sadly the iPod Nano RED and 4th Gen iPod are no longer available, so their other siblings and successors are linked to instead.

I've called this out before, but will do so again for I don't want people to miss out! Whilst you may like simply reading the site via the web (and clearly appreciate design) you're missing out if you don't subscribe to the RSS feed (in the box to your right!). Any new photos I Flickr are included in the feed, and each day you get a del.icio.us bookmark update for any links I've saved. In fact, consider the website the 'light' version of the site. You get a bunch of cool links, and perhaps some cool photos for your viewing pleasure. No ads, the same content as the site, just with extra Web 2.0 goodness.

I used to love the Frappr map that was part of the site. It centered on Manchester, UK, and was a Javascript map that worked really well. Sadly, they went the way of the Flash, and turned out something I was less than pleased with. But now, oh dear god there's a new hideous Flash map. And I can't stand it. Much as I love showing people who's visiting, and from where, if thats what's going to be shown, I want none of it. It's frankly hideous. Anyone got a suggestion / alternative?!

Dashcode Beta meant that I could knock up a quick and easy widget to read the blog. It's hardly the epitome of slickness, but it's fitting for the design, and does what it says on the box. What more could you ask for?! :) So, if you're a dashboard news reader more than a NetNewsWire / NewsFire person: Get your download here! (155k .zip)

(Sidenote: I'm mighty impressed with Dashcode, and will be playing more with it soon. DownloadSquad had a good look at how to use it and create your own cool widgets.)

So today officially sees the new design launched. It's taken a lot of work, but it seems to be fully functional in Internet Explorer too! Yes, I know. A miracle in its own right ;-)

When I showed off the new design to a few friends (and I'm sorry if you weren't one of them), people didn't like the oversized menu bar. I liked it, so I kept it :P ! Why? Well it's large enough to show people not only where to go, but also what is on the site. The photos tab, for now, is simply linking to my Flickr account. The photos section is undergoing something of a re-design, and technical issues mean it didn't make it out the door in time for Christmas (and won't be ready for quite some time). I'm not going to show anything of what I've got planned - just yet - as it doesn't work in anything other than Safari (still) but once it's Gecko-based browser compatible I think I'll unleash it. But to give you a hint, wouldn't it be nice to have a single page that were able to display any slideshow I wanted viewable? :)

As for submenus? Pah. What submenus?! None of those in this new design. Everything is done visually (including a cryptically hidden 'About Page') to keep the menu really simple, but on anything deeper than the top 5 pages, the breadcrumb is at the top of the page for easy backtracking and knowing where you are.

The new design is, perhaps, a little odd. But I finally feel like I've reached a design that actually feels finished. I know it's take nearly 2 years of RapidWeaver use to reach this 'design nirvana', but it's finally here and I'm mighty proud of all of the stuff that's happened on the way. Finally, a few words of thanks to end the post...... Thanks are due to Adam, from SeyDesign, all those who previewed the design, to Mike Franklin who gave the design its name (perhaps I'll leave that explanation for another day - I can feel the keyboard getting knackered as I type), and last but not least to the RealMacSoftware team who create the great software I use for the site. Cheers everyone!

There's one more post due around midnight, but until further notice, I'm taking some time off from the site and enjoying the festive season, and I hope you all do too ;)

Subtitle: Or why I seem to spend more time messing with my own site than any of my RW themes....

Since I hit the web in 2005, the site has been forever changing. The site changes look fairly frequently (something that is stupid, given that until fairly recently there was never a sizeable update of content occurring frequently). And as ever, there is something brewing for the new year (check it out here). But that's not the point. People don't really care about a re-design. Until it's done. So instead of talking about the new design, I'm going to go off on an alternative path. A path on designing for RapidWeaver along with why I use RapidWeaver (I get all manner of emails about that). Enjoy!

Websites
1. Stating the obvious - I am a web snob. I look at a site, and will dismiss it very happily if it contains: Firefox-based browsers not displaying CSS (WTF?!), Use of Java, Windows Media Player content, music that plays when you visit the site, popup adds and more. Some of those things are common things that everyone gets pissed off about. But some things, like CSS not showing in Gecko browsers, are just guaranteed to make me disregard a site, no matter how great it may be in (sigh) Internet Explorer or Safari.

Browser Choice
Following on from my previous point, I'm going to talk about browsers. Safari is the default browser on Mac OS X. It's a great browser, really it is - it's damn fast, and seems less cluttered than others. I also love the Apple + 1, +2 for easy bookmark bar navigation (I'm very much a keyboard shortcut person). But, and this is pretty much the only thing that stops me using Safari full time, GMail does not have all the full functions when in Safari. No web-chat (GTalk/Jabber from within the browser - something that has been really handy at certain points). But other than that, I love Safari - especially as in GMail (something I use for literally every message I send, regardless of the address) I can use the Apple + Left Arrow command to actually get to the start of the line when replying to messages. Camino doesn't do too well with that sadly.
Camino is currently my browser of choice. Firefox power, Mac style. Enough said.
So why am I making a big point over the fact that CSS not showing in Gecko browsers by talking about browsers? Well, a year or so back, it wasn't acceptable to say 'Just use Firefox if you want transparent PNGs to appear properly', in this day and age (with Firefox's market share growing) it's not acceptable to say 'Just use anything other than a Gecko browser'. People respect sites that just *work* on their chosen browser (and that's why my own site is being changed so that it works in everything!). Period.

Why I Use RapidWeaver
1. I like software that exports to a FTP server (not a server-side app) as it allows easier media integration. It also means that moving my site is pretty much simply a case of re-publishing to a new location. OK, things like the Base URL need to change, but that's a 2 second job.
2. RapidWeaver is just so simple yet powerful. Plus, the 3rd party plugins rock.
3. It's developed by an English company. Go RealMac!
4. It allows me to do as little or as much code as I care to. Sometimes I love writing my own code. Sometimes, I choose to leave things such as RSS generation to RapidWeaver (its sorts out the content and permalinks etc).

Designing for RapidWeaver
Once you know how RW's theme workflow goes (css classes, plist bits and pieces), it's really easy to get going with your own themes. Compared with Sandvox, or iWeb *sigh*, it's simply far easier to work with. Sandvox requires lots of HTML files, whereas I find RW's theme structure to be far more compact.

Truth be told, RapidWeaver users are very very diverse, and have a huge amount of creative genius. That means, they're always pushing the limits of what they do with themes. That makes a theme developers job really complex - especially with some of the awesome (previously mentioned) 3rd party plugins available. When I design my own site, I only ever code the stuff I know I'm going to need (blog and styled text) as that encompasses all the page content I'll ever have (apart from the Frappr map) - even the Rapidflickr stuff is taken care of. I never use movie galleries, and photoalbums are already done, so I leave most of the theme empty (come to think about it, it would be easier for me to remove the extraneous portions of code to reduce the CSS files download time, but that's something I'm hesitant to do).

Why do I mention 'my site vs everyone elses'? In short, I've been converting all the had-coded pieces of the current theme I'm using into a sellable RW theme. People have asked for it, but I use so much handcoding at the moment that it wasn't working with all of RWs functions - only those that I use on a day in, day out basis. The logo at the top? Handcoded. The box at the bottom, that too. What about other things, such as lightbox? That too is handcoded. It's not done through an addition to the plist, it was hardcoded into the index.html template. As I tinkered about with the current theme, I simply piled on mode code wherever I wanted it, failing to realise that if I'd done it through RapidWeaver, it wouldn't be biting me in the ass now. So where am I at this point in time? Well, I'm putting all my energies into music right now (this blog post has taken about a week to write) so don't expect it before new year. I'm in need of a break, and a new laptop. I can't code on an iBook that has keys falling off and the Apple and S buttons worn off!

Whether you've visited NikFletcher.com for ages, or are a relatively new visitor, feel free to add yourself to the rather cool Frappr map to show where in the world you're visiting from!

Enjoy!

I agree. Apart from the giving up and using tables. We're a Web Standards factory here don't ya know!

I've become addicted to eye candy recently..... and ignored full Internet Explorer support because, well, I wanted to! Anyway, here's a little glimmer of something I'm hoping to get onto the site in the not too distant future.......

Check the screenshot out here.

I've now got Lightbox technology into every page on the site. It's not being used on every page, but it's going to be used on the blog from now on. I've re-published the post that got my figuring through Lightbox so you can try it out until a new post comes out with it in.... it shouldn't be too long! (Incidentally, I've chosen to put it in my previous post just for good measure).

I've been busy with the site recently. A totally new Photos page, along with a few background changes (mainly for the benefit of Google & co's indexing) and a few new photo slideshows are the new bits and bobs on the site. I've got another 400 or so photos going online in the next month or so (plus any I take in the mean time). Enjoy!

Click me! How many hours can you waste with this?!

Yesterday was a mad day. Today was nearly as mad as yesterday. So when you get an email saying 'you're website is broke in IE 6', what do you reply when you've got a train to catch?
My answer was 'shit'. And then I got on the train (with hindsight, it should have been 'Get Firefox'!). I haven't had a chance to do anything with the CSS since the tip (thanks Seb) but I be soon. What was I doing? Conducting. I travelled to Surrey on Tuesday (from Manchester), conducted Mozart 41 in the evening, and have just arrived back in Manchester. Phew. I did mean to get some photos of me conducting, but conveniently left my camera in my travel bag (and didn't take it to the rehearsal). Anyway, that little photo was taken after having enjoyed the food on Virgin Trains this afternoon. Cheers!

I'm in the process of sorting out some 'stuff' that's wrong on the site. Like some of the slideshow pages (it's theme related), and why the sidebars are showing again. Weird. Trust me, it's being worked on at the moment, but it's going to be a matter of days before everything's back to normal!

Due to essential maintenance by my webhost, there will be possible downtime between the times of 6am to 2pm BST on both Friday and Saturday (19th/20th May). My email read: "Although we do not expect your site to be down for the entire time, we want to make sure our technicians have enough time to correct any unexpected issues that may arise." I'll be attempting to blog whenever I can, but apologies if the site & RSS aren't available.

Apologies for the downtime - NikFletcher.com was down overnight due to my host having server problems. It all appears to have been resolved, so I'll get on with another post!

After a lot of deliberation, time and effort, here's the new design. I had a number of design options - of which I felt this was the best. Comments are more than welcome. I'm going to be meddling with the code in the next few days to get everything finalised [there's still a few things to be fixed] as I've brought it online slightly earlier than I had initially planned to enable myself to get blogging again, but it is a feature rich early release [unlike the feature-less late release that's known as Windows Vista]. I've got a number of posts in the pipline, so stay tuned!

I've decided to make this a new permanent design [this is now NikFletcher.Com version 4.0!]. To that end, I would like to thank all those who gave their feedback about my beta site, and am indebted to Seb Payne whose Photoshop skills improved and created the header image. There's more to do - specific headers for certain pages based on the new design, and any code tweaks that are required, but the site's taken so much shape I'm going to let it loose on y'all.

Listening to ''Theme from Schindler's List'', by John Williams

One very last thing - I've been working a lot on getting the code to validate. Now unfortunately the code won't validate as Strict XHTML, but it will validate as Transitional, so for now that is all it will be ;-)

Well I think I've got enough will to get on with the website's fabled re-design. It won't be a permanent design - more a hasty "get rid of the red" as I know that at least one visitor cannot stand the red and reads the site exclusively through RSS. I'll try to be back bloggin soon, but in order to ensure that the comments all stay linked, I need to not blog during the transition. Thanks for your support - I've added some more archived posts to the front page so that in the mean time this service announcement won't be lonely!

Listening to ''The Battle'', from Gladiator

I've been evangelising Firefox recently and I thought that whilst this could be labelled "Not Another Firefox" post - for there have been so many "Switch to Firefox you Bozos" posts - it should serve a point as to why you shouldn't be using Internet Explorer: I'm talking to all those who make up the 23% of blog visitors who do visit my site in Internet Explorer especially. Below is a screengrab of my planned re-design, as viewed in the very excellent Safari browser [OS X] or Mozilla's Firefox [Win/OS X]:


Now take a look at the Internet Explorer version:

Before some Windows fanboy says "Hey, how did you get IE to screw up the page for a grab like that", well the answer is, I logged onto my beta site here in Internet Explorer. Look at the screenshots and you'll notice that there's no menu bar [or drop-down menus], and that the sidebar is about a screensize down the page [when viewed in IE]. So, I have a choice. Either persuade 23% of visitors to use Firefox, or go with another design. Hmmm, both require a bit of effort, but I'll let you know what I decide. In the meantime, download Firefox now and see how the web is meant to be displayed!

Whilst I'm blogging, I've got something to add: For anyone who thinks "Why aren't Mac users using Internet Explorer?" Well we did have IE for Mac. But it died a long drawn out, and long overdue death recently. It displayed websites worse than the Windows version [if that's at all possible] and at one stage, the default homepage [MSN.Com] of IE for Mac crashed the browser! Another tip: In preparation for switching to the Mac [hey, come on - you know you ought to] use Firefox, and you won't have to worry about changing browser when you switch! ;-)

If you have any comments at all about the new design, leave them in the specially designated "Comments" bit below!

Just another note to say that I'll happily linkshare with regular visitors [go give those kind folk already linking to me some more hits from here]. Simply contact me via the Email form with the title "Link to Me" and a URL somewhere in the body of the message [text description too please!] and I'll take a look with a view to sharing links! Apologies for the numerous, yet short, entries recently. I'll be posting a lot more now that I'm on vacation!

Have been busy with a gig the last few days, so haven't had a chance to blog. More soon.

Apologies for my 4 day disappearing act - it wasn't intentional, and certainly wasn't a pleasant four days. Why? One word. Flu. Ah well, I'm back now, and pretty much back to health :-D Whilst lying in bed, I heard the beep go for a new email message [well, I got more than one email message :-p but this was something relevant to the website!]. Why excitement, well there's a new version of Rapidflickr a plugin [used here] for the very excellent Rapidweaver software that manages the site's structure and all the other clever stuff. I've been playing with it, and I've got it working with LIVE UPDATES! :-o Everyone is probably thinking Whoopdeeedooo! But this is cool news. Why? Well I've set it so that my Flickr Page now shows my most "interesting" photos from my Flickr photo sets and as their interestingness [a Flickr term, not mine!] changes, so will the content on the page! Thanks to John McLaughlin, whose brilliant plugin-with-PHP-goodness makes it all possible!

Monday was a B-U-S-Y day for NikFletcher.Com and Feb 06 is officially the first gigabyte month of 2006 for my site! An incredible 330 new visitors chose to visit the site [mainly due to the MacWorld coverage]. Thanks for visiting, and stay tuned for more! :-D

Recently, I stated I loved to hear from website visitors. However someone who knows how to contact me said "If that's true, why is there now no contact form on your site?" Well the answer was simple. There's been a few spamming vulnerabilities recently with the contact form I use, and so I took it offline to await a fix. Now that fix available [thanks to Josh Lockhart], I've put it back online! I've not yet converted slideshows to Flickr - and with good reason. The time it will take me just to re-configure the layout for the pages is about 30 minutes, let alone ensure that no-ones bookmarks are broken by the change. I've got other more pressing things to do, but it certainly is at the back of my mind.......

Ooooh. I got a mention on MacWorld UK! Just remember where you heard the Apple Store Arndale news first! ;-)

Also, check out the new [+] buttons (right) for myYahoo and Google Reader and Personalised Homepage!

In the true tradition of English Railways, there's going to be more engineering work this weekend on NikFletcher.Com. My aim is to change all of my slideshows to use Flickr as opposed to using my own software because my iBook will struggle to cope with any more Photo Slideshows! Unlike English Railway maintenance however, there will be no replacement bus services as the site will still be online - I'll just be doing the work offline and uploading it on Sunday afternoon.

Apologies to those who visited in the hope my site would be working. It clearly wasn't and so I've been fiddling with the site to fix it. How did I break the site? Well. I didn't. The software did - but you probably don't believe that! I basically tried to apply a few things to all pages, and it crapped up all the settings. Weird. Anyway, it's all back and good, and hopefully fixed. I've sadly had to take the contact form offline for security reasons, but if you need to contact me, use this address:

enquiries [at] nikfletcher [dot] com

Well here it is! My new site design. I'd like to thank those who looked at the original 'draft' version of the site [Seb Payne and Cara] and for their input. Cheers people, and enjoy! Comments are always welcome.

Update: I'm aware that Comments are not fully styled, but I am working on this!

Apologies for the lack of news. I've been busy working on a new site design..... it's going to be online very soon! ;-)

I'm tweaking the site behind the scenes at the moment. If you're experiencing problems, please try again later! :-) Thanks

Do you want your blog to be read by more people? Do you want to share links with my blog? Well read more!

If you want to be included on my Links page [which will shortly be re-adjusted to include a Blogroll], then here's what I ask of you:

1. Your site must be publicly accessible [e.g. no private MSN spaces or subscription blogs].
2. You must link to http://www.nikfletcher.com in return
3. Your blog and content must not be of a 'dubious' nature

In return, I will place a link in my Blogroll section. To get started, Contact Me, being sure to use the subject "Link to Me" on the form otherwise the message will not be received!

If you're not convinced it's worth your while, well here's five facts about my blog.....

1. On average 2000 unique visitors each month....
2. An average of 55,000 hits a month......
3. My blog is found by searching on Google for any of 200 keyphrases.....
4. Between 10 and 20% of all visitors bookmark my site.....
5. I get visitors from all around the world - Japan, Australia, Europe, America, Canada......To get a feel for where in the world people visit from, try my Frappr Map, and don't forget to add yourself! ;-)

That would be I. In my bid to try and get an actual site online with the dratted Sandvox software, I entered what I thought were the correct settings to publish my test site in a special folder. Unfortunately, with the PITA that is the setup assistant, it didn't work, and instead overwrote the blog page for a short while. Sorry about that.

Just as well I have no intention of changing to Sandvox. It's just not as good as it was supposed to be..... :-(

Apologies to any visitors who were unable to view the website at any stage today. I've been tinkering with the webspace, and due to the vast amount of pages on the site, I thought it best to make all the pages inaccessible whilst I fiddled with the settings in case anything were to go wrong! All pages have been re-uploaded - any problems with the site, please use the Contact Form. Thanks!

I've been compiling more links and have been busy uploading my entire iPhoto library [bar a few photos] to Flickr. Enjoy these new sections - however please note that the Flickr page is still in "Beta" as I'm not using a finished page plugin yet! ;-)

The Nik's Pics! page has now been updated with lots of AJAX and DHTML goodness thanks to Isaiah Carew's Collage Plugin.

As a visitor, you can tell when I'm fiddling with the website. Odd loading times [if it loads at all], lots of missing pages and occasionally a distinct lack of any text styling at all :-[. Today was one of those days where I played with the site - it really was just behind the scenes updates with some code updates and a couple of blog feed images added. So I check the "live" site - the one you're reading right now - and noticed the "Made with Rapidweaver" box wasn't straight and the Frappr map wasn't linking correctly. Bugger :-! Sorting the link is easy - I'd merely missed off a "/" from the Frappr URL, but the formatting baffled me. In a bold move I re-coded the sidebar content and it now has sorted itself. Phew. [A later autopsy of a backup file revealed some code that created a break in the text - even though I didn't write it in!]

And the meaning of all of this? Well it's merely a plug for RW - there's a few things I'd love for the folk over at RealMacSoftware to sort [and I'm sure they will] - but Rapidweaver still blows away all the competition - especially seeing as Karelia Software's Sandvox program is running behind their initial schedule. I can't wait for MacExpo as there could be some more news on a new Rapidweaver version :-D! How do I know that? Let's just say a little birdy told me some things..... ;-)

I've been looking through iPhoto [before it gets updated at MWSF ;-)] and realised why Photo titles weren't showing. I've put the names of Photos as comment! :-o oops. I've now put up 70 or so photos from the USA holiday. Find them here. Why have I put them online? Purely for the fact that I have too much bandwidth and webspace to use! ;-) More photos soon [once I've done a HDD transplant], as well as a Flickr page!

Removed Gallery pages as they're not as easy to manage as the slideshow.

I've been editing the site today, streamlining it somewhat and added a new page. The site is now officially finished in the new theme! :-D

Just added a whole load of photos from a small party we had in the flat whilst we decorated our [REAL :-D] Christmas tree! They can be found here.

As some of you have probably read, I enjoy seeing where people find out about my site, and where they're from in the world. To provide me with some more statistics, I installed Google Analytics on the site a few weeks ago. Due to the overwhelming demand for the now free Webstats service, I've only just got the stats through from Google.
The one thing I love about Analytics is the fact that I can block my IP Address from registering hits, so I can see who [if anyone] is visiting my site as opposed to me doing live-testing of the site! The one thing I hate is that the code does not validate as XHTML, but I'm going to check that today or tomorrow as time permits so that the homepage once again is valid XHTML [means I'll have to modify the MSN Alerts code as well :-(]. Once Google accepts registrations again, I'd recommend you to take advantage of the free website service which used to be $199 a month [I understand], in Firefox however as it's another Google offering that doesn't support Safari [yet :-|].

Here's some screen grabs of the stats for the site. If you're a first time visitor, please fill in my Frappr map to show where all my visitors are from!