Tag: website

General Website News

Hopefully you won’t have noticed, but there have been a few changes to the website over the last week.

I started the process of moving to Bootstrap 4 and FontAwesome 5 when they were released, but kind-of lost momentum. This stuff is a “necessary evil”, rather than something I’m actively interested in. A couple of early trials proved it wasn’t just a case of using the new versions. I had got about 90% of the way there, but couldn’t force myself to complete the last bit.

Recently I had some advice from a couple of people at work who know more about this sort of thing than me. They quickly pointed out some glaringly obvious flaws in what I was doing, which focused me somewhat. I finally bit the bullet over the weekend and flipped to the new versions. There were a few “interesting” things along the way, including me forgetting to style CODE and PRE tags, which are kind-of important for a website that is almost entirely about code samples. 🙂

I’m sure there will be tweaks over the coming weeks, but I think it’s sorted now. I’m guessing if I hadn’t mentioned it, most people wouldn’t know it had happened. 🙂

Much as this stuff is “not my thing”, but it is good to keep an eye on how things change over time. I now know enough to know I don’t know enough though… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Happy Birthday to oracle-base.com (sort-of)

birthday-cake-clipartToday is another anniversary, but this time it’s the website, which is 15 years old.

OK. This is a bit of a cheat because:

  • The website originally had a different name, so you could say the website with it’s current name is 13 months younger, but it’s the same site, so whatever.
  • I don’t actually know the exact day the first page went online, but I do know the date I bought the original domain name (before the rename to oracle-base.com), so I know the first page was put up about now.

Anyway, July 3rd is from now on the official birthday of the website. Makes it easy to remember, because it’s the day after my birthday.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. For those that are interested, the blog was 10 years old last month. I do know the exact date for that because the posts are dated and you can read the first post. 🙂

Updates a plenty…

Someone commented recently that I’ve not been writing much lately. That surprised me because I feel like I’m constantly writing. Looking back over the last few months of changes to my website, I can see where that opinion comes from. The majority of the stuff I’ve been writing recently are updates. Typically what happens is I answer questions by linking to articles on my site. This invariably forces me to read through my old stuff and cringe. It then goes on my to-do list.

Sometimes the changes are cosmetic. Sometimes they are total rewrites. Sometimes the rewrites are because of product enhancements, but other times they are because I now realise how little I understood when I wrote the initial article. As usual, the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.

New versions of the database prompt new features articles. New OS releases often prompt a batch of installation articles. The “quiet” times between are often spent cleaning up the crap. 🙂

So just because you don’t see a bunch of articles on the front page marked as new, don’t assume I’m doing nothing. The is always a touch of light (website) housework going on… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…