April 2006 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
Hampshire County Council Support (27th April 2006)
The good people who host Calthorpe Park School’s website have enabled the .htaccess directives for us. Many thanks in particular to Debbie Sundborg who added the extra lines in their httpd.conf master configuration file.
This change allows me to move things around and set up internal redirects so users will get automatically sent to the new location. Now that we've settled on the new site, we can move the new site out of the /homepage/ folder into the domain root. I can set up a RedirectMatch directive so that all requests for the old folder get redirected to the equivalent location from the domain root.
Spring Cleaning (27th April 2006)
I have gone through all the pages of Project Cerbera to ensure the content starts with an <h2> heading. Various other fixes and optimisations have been made, so the website should look a bit tidier and perform a bit better.
One of the things I’ve changed is the way the character encoding is set. I added the following to my .htaccess file:
# Add character encodings to Content-Type headers:
AddType 'text/css; charset=utf-8' .css
AddType 'text/html; charset=utf-8' .htm .htmlI make sure that my markup and stylesheets only use us-ascii characters which are the same as the start of utf-8. When a user agent requests any of these file types from Project Cerbera, the HTTP Response headers will be:
Content-Type: text/css; charset=utf-8
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8This method has a higher priority than the <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" ... > elements, so they have now been removed. This saves 74 bytes on every page and means I can see an extra line of markup when editing pages.
Contact from Hampshire County Council (19th April 2006)
Got a phone call this morning regarding Calthorpe Park School, specifically my request for the Council to give me more control over our portion of their server. I’d like access to the .htaccess directives of the Apache web server system so that I can set up redirects from the URLs of the old website to the equivalent location on the new website.
I’d also use this file to protect the curriciculum resources section so it could not be accessed without supplying the correct account name and password.
This Section is a Blog (19th April 2006)
I’ve finally come to terms with it: this News section is practically a blog and has been since the start. I’ll probably rename the menu and change the URL around the start of next month when I make the page for the May news. A RedirectMatch directive in the .htaccess file for this website will ensure any old links and bookmarks get sent to the new locations.
Redecorated Computer Room (19th April 2006)
My parents spent the Easter weekend shifting everything out of our computer room and completely redecorating it. The computer is now in, we have new storage cupboards and the new paint looks great. There’s a lot more space in here now, although everything hasn’t been shifted back in yet.
First Cycle Rides (19th April 2006)
I’ve been for my first two cycle rides of 2006. The first was on 2006-04-14 and I rode for over an hour around my town and the surrounding countryside. Rode to a large pond on the other side of town which I hadn’t been to in years and explored some of the tracks around it. Went cycling again on 2006-04-15 to my local library so I could catch up on the forums.
It was really quite pleasent and I feel a lot less stressed now. We have quite a few short, sharp hills around here so you can really attack them, which I find a good way of letting of some steam.
Myriad Islands Railway (11th April 2006)
JasonB and I have been discussing more details about the Myriad Islands Railway. JasonB has built a draft route for the railway across his South East illCOM docklands and put a preliminary railway station and freight siding on it.
He will be developing a more optimised and better textured bridge section which can then be run along the route we finalised the other week. Once this is in place, the railway across the Northern islands can be started by illspirit, which will eventually lead to an official baseland release for the Northern islands.