Website
Two colleagues mentioned my website was looking a bit messy on the same day. The main culprit being the left-hand toolbar, which had loads of links and search tools. When you live with something for so long it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees, but when I took an objective look I had to admit it was in a bit of a state. As a result, I spent the weekend having a bit of a cleanup.
I simplified the navigation and everything except the homepage is clutter free. I figured, when you click on an article you’re there to read it, not stare at loads of navigation and search widgets.
I think the basic layout will stay like this for a while, but I’ve not decided on colour scheme or the shape of the tabs and borders. It might stay like this. It might change. Whatever I decide, I want it to be very clean and simple.
PC Cleanup
At the same time, I fancied a bit of a cleanup of my main PC at home. I do almost everything on virtual machines, so I can use any OS that has a browser and can run VMware Server.
I’ve been using CentOS 5 for ages, and although it’s a stable server OS, it’s a long way behind Fedora and Ubuntu in terms of desktop features. I think I’ve made my feelings about Fedora clear, so I decided to give Ubuntu 8.0.4 a go.
I’ve been playing round with Ubuntu virtual machines for a while (since version 6 I think), but I’ve never run it as a host operating system, so I was expecting a few problems. Fortunately, everything worked out of the box. As soon as VMware Server was installed I could start all the VMs on my NAS and life was good.
It’s only been a couple of days, but I’m starting to think once all my talks and conferences are out of the way I’ll switch my laptop to Ubuntu also. I just need time to check the demos and presentations work. I’m in Estonia next week so I don’t think now is the time to start messing about.
Ubuntu ships with a beta of FireFox 3. I wrote a brief post about FF3 a while ago. Having used it for a while I decided to load the RC1 version on my Vista (yuk) laptop and it’s working fine. I’ve read some press reports about bugs, but I’ve not come across any problems yet. There’s talk of an RC2 version, but hopefully the final release will be soon.
Cheers
Tim…