Web Design

When I made the change to this new website a month ago, I also made the move from my previous web host, Hoststock, to Dreamhost. Despite lots of complainers who whine about occasional announced downtime overnight on selected servers (that I find better than other hosts’ frequent unannounced daytime downtime), I signed up with them. I couldn’t be happier. I now have more space and bandwidth than I could use, with slightly faster response times, and a great control panel. The main reason I’m posting about this is because of the great one-click install system Dreamhost has. When setting up the website I had a one click install of Wordpress. Today I had a one click upgrade from Wordpress 2.1.2 to 2.1.3. It went flawlessly. They warned I that I may have to reinstall themes or plugins after the upgrade, but I had to do neither. It was perfect. Upgrading web software is typically a nightmare so this is a very nice change.

While on the topic of Dreamhost, I think I’ll point people in the direction of the other projects I currently host… Dash Studios, Diefuchsjagden and The LAN Station. Have a Happy Easter everyone!

Here we are… another new website for Kevin. I think this will be my 8th attempt at a personal website since I started doing this whole web design thing in 1999. Each revision adds something new and refreshes the web design process for me. The old website worked well, and as you can see the new look is similar. That’s partially by design. This new website runs on WordPress.

My old website was a content management system of my own design, built to resemble WordPress. It worked well enough, but it was getting old. The layout code wasn’t very flexible. I never did get around to developing the input interface I wanted to and always ended up entering content directly through phpMyAdmin. That got tiring fast. The largest problem was the comment spam. I periodically deleted it from the database, but it was getting to a rate of 10-20 a day. That’s too much. WordPress solves all that. Extensible code, a wealth of themes and plugins to use and modify, and most of all… a comment spam blocker!

The current layout you see before you is a first draft. It will be adjusted and tweaked in the days and weeks to come. As you can see by the page footer, this theme that I created is a remix of the fSpring and Shaded Grey WordPress themes. Once I’m done with it, the theme may not resemble those two much anymore.

There’s currently one other article there for you to read. Tomorrow I’ll have another all new article. Each day after that for the next week, I’ll bring back one of the articles from the old website. I may even bring something back from the websites earlier than that (back from when this place was called KM3K World, as those who have known me a long time will know). I’m looking forward to getting back into this whole web design thing. Huzzah!