I’m in the process of moving everything to a new WordPress blog. ExpressionEngine is great and all that but it’s too slow and image handling is a bit rubbish. You can find the new site at http://www.buttonsofmymind.co.uk/.

I’ll probably leave this site alone for a bit but direct people to the new site.

I’ve finally moved the astroimages to their own gallery (which is what I should have done ages ago). So no more broken category listings and the galleries should run a lot quicker. I’ve started a new category for images of the Lunar 100 which I will be filling up when I can. I’ve also tidied up a few broken links and edited the about page.

I’m going to try blogging a bit more often too.

My host has kindly updated the PHP version this evening which has caused some problems on the site. Most noticeably the photo galleries which are exceeding the memory allocation. I’m on the case and will fix them ASAP.

UPDATE: I isolated the problem to the category index. So at the moment it’s showing all the categories in both galleries. The thumbnail generator is also misbehaving at the moment and resizing images that don’t need resizing!

I’ve been spending some time tweaking the templates. I wasn’t completely happy with listing every entry from the LEJOG category on the home page and swamping all the other content. So I’ve gone for a summary/more layout for a bit to see if that works better in my head.

I also spotted quite a few errors in the templates whilst I was doing this, for example anything in the LEJOG category wouldn’t show as a single entry! Hopefully I’ve eliminated all/most of these now.

In other site news, I’ve slightly changed the galleries so the thumbnails should load a little faster. I’ve also changed the way the astroimages are shown in the lightbox.

Seems to generate as much comment as anything on my site! Is it really that bad? The irony of asking for comments on leaving comments isn’t lost on me! I have to have the captcha to stop the spammers and I want to leave comments open to all. I still get the occasional spam comment and am considering upping the security a little more (it won’t change the current comment method).

The other option is to only allow comments from members, which would mean you would have to join the site to post comments. Or to require email confirmation for every single comment left. I think both of these are more of a pain than how it is currently set up.

Please tell me what’s wrong with it and what would make it better for you.

I’ve also noticed I’m not getting informed when people leave comments as it should be doing, I need to fix this.

I’ve renewed my subscription to ExpressionEngine as I was getting quite a way behind with versions. So I’m now all shiny and new and hopefully everything still works OK, I’ll spend some time checking that nothing has broken with the update. If you spot anything that is broken please comment to this post. Thanks.

I’ve spent some time altering the layout of the site to get some more consistency. I’ve also added the Flash slideshow at the top of the main page and a Flash lightbox in the photo section.

Added some more photos of recent visits to London.

I’ve upped a load of new photos, all astronomical. After the delight of Comet McNaught I dug out some old photos I had of Comet Hale-Bopp. I also took another opportunity this week to get some photos of Mercury whilst it was in conjunction with Venus.

You may have noticed the new link on the menu bar above. I have added a flash movie player to the site and have started adding video clips I took whilst I was in Mozambique. Hopefully everything works OK, if you notice any problems please comment.