mybigadventures.com

I had looked at a few other blog type sites and decided I wanted to simplify the URLs for the website. After a quick read around on the Internet I came across Apache mod rewrite for the .htaccess file. Now that's more than likely meaningless to anyone that might look at the site and up until very recently didn't mean a lot to me either. After having a looking on a couple of different websites, it seemed to achieve what I was looking for with very little effort.

To begin with I had to create a .htaccess file in notepad as there wasn't one in the root directory of my hosting account.

I started by adding:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Multiviews

This enabled mod rewrite on my hosting account with godaddy

I then started by removing the requirement for .php at the end of my php pages. I copied and pasted the code for this from a site I came across:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.php [L] 

I then added a few custom rewrites to simplify access of the blog and album elements of the website. Having very little experience of mod rewrite I was really pleased to find an automated tool in the shape of www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/index.php.

That's pretty much it, now I have super simple URLs instead of those long php parameterised ones that I had before!

Well I thought it was about time I made a few improvements to the website aesthetic as its looked a bit stuck in the past for quite sometime - some might argue, since its inception. The black is gone, as has most other colour replaced by a lot of white open spaces. Hopefully it looks a little cleaner and still remains easy to navigate. There have also been a few updates in the background to help things run more smoothly and a few more features from the old site have been converted to now work in PHP. There's still a lot to do but it is certainly the most significant update the website has had in a good few years.

In other news we went to Kew garden yesterday. The weather was nice and sunny if a little cool in the breeze at times. Fiona came to meet us so we had a good catch-up. Everywhere is starting to look a lot more green and colourful now that the flowers are starting to come out and it's beginning to feel quite summery. Here's hoping the weather continues - I'm pretty sure I saw an article last week promising a three month heat wave, so here's hoping!

It's been a busy time at school on the lead up to Easter getting all the work finished including over the break itself. Both Dani and I were in with year 11, 12 and 13 students for revision and coursework completion sessions. Now that we're back after the break, we're entering the exam season at school. A lot of deadlines are looming for entry of coursework marks and it's not long before year 11 are sitting their first exams.

With the summer getting closer we've started to think about the break and what we might get up to. We're not sure yet but have started to go back through the journal we kept on our Europe trip to give us some ideas, so I guess we shall see.

Hopefully I should get a few more updates on before the summer. There's still a lot of the album functionality that doesn't work from an admin perspective. I can't upload new photos to the site yet. Keep checking back though and feel free to look though the archives where most of the content currently resides. 

Who would have thought it, just 3 short years (to the day) after the last update and we're back online. All that was required was a total re-write from Java to PHP. Simple! I've added a few updates that make things work a little better along the way. Now you can see what albums the random images on the front page belong to, and even more interesting for us - see what the random comments link to. I think that's all for now folks! Rock and Roll!