New on Archill.Net

Added a new item to the main menu: Software. In the future it will be possible to download free software developed by me. The first program PhotoCopy, to copy pictures from a digital camera to a PC, is available as the first program in this menu.

After almost 3 months the site is now completely converted into the new layout. For a visitor this is not noticable, most of the pages look exactly like they did before. Only the photo gallery pages has been changed. All pages now use a HTML 4.01 Strict DOCTYPE definition.

Started with a layout change of the photo pages. The first one is the photo page of our vacation to Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan. This change also included a change of the doctype of the page from transitional to strict. Another change is that page markup is now done as much as possible using CSS and with less tables. In due time all pages on this site will be adapted.

The travelogue of our vacation to Ireland is finished in a Dutch as well as an English version. For now this is the last part of the site that is bi-lingual. All future updates will only be in Dutch, this because it takes a lot of time and work to translate the pages and the visitors to this site are mainly (80%) from The Netherlands and Belgium. Also the most used search engine, Google, is less charmed by English pages on a server located in The Netherlands.

Installed an update of the guestbook. The old version used a flat file for storing all messages, the new version uses a MySql database for storing them. Also emoticons can be added to the text and text van be marked bold, italic or underlined.

Installed a new PHP page and visitor counter. After a long test period in which both the old and the new counter ran in parallel, the old one is removed and fully replaced by the new counter. All logfiles of the old counter since January 12 2003 are converted and the total number of visitors and pageviews adjusted. The new counter is better in handling visitors with dynamic IP addresses by using cookies (it expires 15 minutes after the last page of this site has been retrieved). It is also better in distinguishing different visitors behind the same proxy server.

After many request there is finally a guestbook available. For this I write my own PHP script. The 'free' guestbook services available on the internet all have ad banners and the PHP scripts available on the net did not fulfill my requirements. Thats why I wrote my own guestbook from scratch.

After a few weeks of hard work the completely renewed site is ready. The site has a complete new look and feel. De table of contents on the left side is better arranged now so one can click faster through this site. A new feature is that each page can be printed in a printer friendly manner. When you click on the printer icon in the upper navigation bar you will only get the contents of the page without all navigation features.