The last time I updated the Work page was probably sometime in 2005. This was back when the site was still on free hosting and looked all grey and lime green.

Yeah, it's been a long time. Quite a bit has happened since then, not least of which is this redesign. I've always wanted to redo the work page, make it richer and more than just a bunch of images, but then I realised that while I was putting that off for the right time (it would be a good deal of work), two years had gone by.

So, I bit the bullet, sorted through my work and came up with a bunch of stuff -- some of which has been posted on the journal before -- but much of which is new. So surf on over to the work page and have a look around. There's about 30 new things in the Design and Illustration sections. I haven't added anything to photos yet, and might do so in the coming weeks.

V

In case you never noticed, there's a 'Recent Comments' column in the sidebar, and the more astute among you will realise that my comment has been sitting at the top of the pile for quite a while now. At first I thought it was just my readers being polite and staying silent while I ranted and raved about hot army women, haunted dream homes, and the unsexiness of the modern caveperson. But, pretty-much every reader of this blog is a blogger themselves, and we're a chatty lot. It was unusual to have no comments for weeks.

I decided to test the system out, and lo and behold, ran across a host of problems, all of which had to do with a malfunctioning captcha system (a 'captcha' is a test to find out if you're a human and not a malicious spam program, by asking you to answer a question only a human could) . Hmm, malfunctioning is not entirely right, because it seems to have been behaving a little too well.

I get a fair amount of spam on this site; less than most, but significant enough to be a problem. Most of it is trackback spam which, by design, isn't an easy thing to combat, but Drupal does a decent job of things.

Comment spam, on the other hand, has been giving me a headache or two, and not in the way that you think. You see, Drupal does catch most if not all of it, but it also overzealously picks up real people's comments (and as you can no doubt see, I have far too few of those as it is!), just like my last CMS, Pivot.

After months of slacking off, I finally got round to doing something I should have done way back in March: I've redesigned the site's look!

When I switched over to Drupal I used the Minnelli template, a default template that comes with the program. Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice and functional template, but being a graphic designer and using a standard template on my own site is a bit... well, shameful.

The site's had no activity over the last week or two because I've been spending my time switching over to a whole new content management system, Drupal.

It took me this long to convert all the content over from my old CMS, Pivot. Drupal is a much more robust (and much more complex) system which is what I need keeping in mind what I would like this site to be over the next few years. I doubt that I will ever need to switch again.

You will also note that the blog has changed to 'journal' and that there are now RSS feeds for pretty-much everything.

Also, the biggest change (and the thing that took up most of the last two weeks' work) is the inclusion of every single blog I've had since 2001 into the journal. More on all this stuff later, because now I need to go out and buy myself a new camera.

Honestly, if Dan hadn't pointed it out to me, I wouldn't even know that there was anything wrong with comments. Since switching to the new version of Pivot I've been happy to have the increased spam protection. Now I don't have to spend an hour every day hunting through posts and reporting fine interwub robots who comment on my site's "nice professional design" and then try to sell me viagra. To catch the few that did still manage to squeeze through I put in a human indentifying, spambot nixing question on posts older than ten days, and that did the trick too.

So I finally got my own domain name to go with the paid webspace.

The site now and forever onwards will be accessible from allVishal.com

Kindly update your links.

V

Welcome to the new allVishal.

In case you didn't notice, you've been redirected to the new host of this site at publiksquare.com. No ads, woohoo! The lightbox script on the work page functions properly now. Also, there's a crappy picture of me up on the about page. I figured all these years of hiding my beauty from the world didn't even result in one crazed stalker, so the embargo on photos of me has now been lifted. May not end up posting personal photos on the blog, however, but who knows. There are all those nekkid pics...

...and it's done.

The blog has been converted. It's been messy (I actually had to use non-relative links, which I am told is a CSS no-no), but it's 1 am, I'm sleepy, and while there's this nagging gap on the tops of entry pages (but not on the index) that will have to be tracked down and killed, it's pretty much as it will be for a while.

So, like it? Love it? Hate it? Comments, please...

V

Today I'm going to try and work the blog template to look like the rest
of the site, so it will get messed up, and until further notice is WIP.

Please wear your Hard Hat.

V