Well thats the menu and template tweeks pretty much compleated, the page is now restricted to the same length as the background image, not sure if this is how things will stay, but it gives the site a better look for 2015; I might just change the background image and let it scroll again - but for now at least it can stay how it is.
I dont like using flash / java wherever I dont really need it, sadly that appears to be costing me a little on this website. One issues that has probably been here for some time is that some browsers are not rendering my CSS menu correctly, damn and blast to that...
The issue is that the first few links of the main page - do not function, more an annoyance than a serious issue, but now that I know about it - it needs to be fixed up.
The good news is that I have already written a new menu for this site, I just need to implement it. Shouldn't take too long.
The new Raspberry Pi 2 is quite an interesting beast, for some time it has been possible to run small low power web applications on the raspberry pi, but now with much more CPU power and 1GB of RAM, the pi has become quick the pocket powerhouse. Moore's Law affects even the pocket and of the computer world it seems. This has caused me to seriously question my own hosting arangements, why should I continue to pay for hosting (with 1GB of RAM and 50GB of storage) when I could achieve the same results with a Raspberry Pi?
I dont host anything that really uses that much power answers that many hits - so I could just run a single pi and have roughly the same resources and cut the monthly bills. Its an interesting option for sure, one that needs at least some thought about how it might work.
Still going through the many things that need to be updated on this site, there are plenty of things that are no longer working quite like they should. On the road to curing some of the larger issues I have updated the RSGB scraper to work with the new RSGB website, bless the RSGB for finally using a system that is able to output RSS - the old scraper had to quite literally pull the text from the old site and then replace the text in-line to strip HTML tags. The new RSGB site uses a content management system (CMS) of some kind that also provides RSS feeds for the news available on the site. After the epic I had for getting the images out of the BBC News web site this was a really simple upgrade, great to see the RSGB using newer technology.
Well the good news is that apple did indeed fix the app store (and other online stores) after a rather long outage that, no doubt, caused some frustration for a fair few users.