Blogging

Aaagh!

It is like living on a knife edge when you have your blog on a server that is getting so many hits!

One of the Ultralab servers was hacked last week, and whilst not a great deal of damage was done, it did take it off line for a number of days. The worst part of this was the timing – just before a bank holiday weekend when no-one would be around to fix the problems.

SO it was that this blog was off line for five days. Sorry to all of you who tried and failed to get in whilst looking for Dension files, Limara info, stuff about cameras, the Highways Agency or DVD authoring in general. It really couldn’t have come at a worse time!

We are back up and running (as you can see) but it emphasises the point that this blog needs to move homes. Doing so will undoubtedly cause issues, not least we will lose google juice and people who have linked to these pages will lose the links. Hopefully we’ll be able to take enough time before moving to allow proper redirection and google bots enough time to re-link the pages.

I had a go at changing the look and feel of the blog tonight. I quite liked the original ‘X-template’ look, but wanted to have a go at changing the colours.

The obvious changes were to alter the header images – look in the themes folder and navigate to ‘pushbutton’ and all of the images used in the theme are here. However, much of the drupal site depends on cascading style sheets… and this needs opening in an application such as CSS Edit – there you will see a huge number of items to change, and by working through the source code for the page you will see what class or style is attached to each element. You can then locate that in CSS Edit pretty easily and alter the colour values.

I found the ‘Digital Colour Meter’ in the Utilities folder pretty useful here too! (That is the Apple Mac ‘Applications/Utilities’ folder… nothing to do with Drupal)

Any thoughts about colour schemes welcome – it shouldn’t take too much to alter again now I can see how it all hangs together!

Thanks to Matthew Eaves for the prompts on getting started with this!