As much as I liked the last design for the site, it just didn't work anymore. The columns were too narrow: the code samples had to be edited to fit the narrow width and images had to be scaled fairly small to fit the narrow colum.

I designed and almost finished the RapidWeaver template almost year ago. Whilst adding recent posts with copious code examples, I saw that I really needed to get the new template used. I wanted the new design to be easy to read longer articles and typographically mature. I do think the site, is perhaps, not as distinctive, but is far less painful to read.

I'm using RapidWeaver 4.0 now, and have made a few small changes, partly due to new features in RapidWeaver, partly due to changes at Watershed and partly because I just haven't completed the template. Comments are back, iChat status and links are gone and so is Twitter messages.

It's been a while since I posted anything and one of my New Year's resolutions was to post useful, technical information, more frequently. I guess I haven't started the year very well with a post whinging on about QuickTime just before the end of the month.

It was a busy last few months of the year. It is always like that every year at work. All the arts and media events appear to happen in the last quarter. I been busy at Watershed working on sites such as Electric December, Watershed and trying to get Communicate 1.0 finished and deployed.

I've also been busy helping Jackie with her Pontypridd station residency, working on three RapidWeaver plug-ins (one of which came to nothing), designing a new brochure for Prema and 'things' for other people. We've also been working hard on the Church Hall, trying to make it resemble a house a bit more (although we still don't have any heating).

I've decided to start using the public beta of RapidWeaver 3.5 to edit the site now. I mention this in case the site goes a 'bit funny' over the next few weeks. For a public beta it appears very stable and hopefully the site will still be online tomorrow. The interface changes are a refreshing change and the layout feels much more logical, especially splitting some of the inspectors into separate panels.

I need to make some small changes to the template (apart from finishing it) to allow it to work with RapidWeaver 3.5. Rich media content is now embedded using Javascript and the functions are missing from my JS file. I thought I read that a feature of the blog in 3.5 was the ability to make 'sub pages' use the main template with the sidebar menus. Just can't seem to get that to work.

The more I use Rapidweaver, the more I like it and recommend it to anybody with a Macintosh who asks how to create and maintain a web site quickly and easily. A demo can be downloaded from RealMac Software's site.

This is the new template for the site now. It's quite nice to be able to develop something for myself and not have people say "isn't the text a bit small?" or "no colour then?". Well they do say it but being my own site and can just ignore it. The same goes for browsers: the site is primarily designed for Safari & Firefox. It looks OK in IE 6. I'm not too bothered about other browsers.

The RapidWeaver theme isn't finished yet and there are some rough edges but enough is done that I can use it. There are no heirarchic menus at the top of the page so I need to wait until that is done before adding photos and the 'selection' blog pages (when you view a month or category) need a little work. I also need to finish off the sidebar and add Javascript to extend the page to the full size of the window.

Just thought I would say some more about this site and how it is built.

I'm using RapidWeaver, from Brighton based Realmac Software, to make this site. It's such a sweet little application. Very MacOS X. I guess it's designed for Mom & Pop but if you spend all day at work trying to force IE to do something other browsers don't appear to have a problem with then you don't want to do that in the evening as well.

I'm using one of the templates that ships with RapidWeaver at the moment. It's pleasant enough but given some time should be able to get something a little less bright in place. Site templates are nice little MacOS X bundles with all the required files inside. There is normally an XHTML page with placeholder markers, CSS & Javascript files and all the interface graphic files inside the bundle. There is a healthy market for selling themes but I don't think I will have the time.

RapidWeaver is so easy to use and new plug-ins can be built for it so instead of building a site for a client and updating it under contract, it makes much more sense to just provide the client with a theme (and possibly plug-ins) and they can update the content with their own RapidWeaver.

I thought I would start a personal web site. Having spent so many years building web sites for so many people it seemed odd that I didn't have one. I don't have a particular need for a web site really - just a place to gather pictures of friends & family, store the odd file and record recipes that exist on pieces of paper scattered around the house.

I originally started putting stuff up on www.fourbytwoflat.com but I need to use that for other things soon and wanted to extract as much value from my .mac subscription as possible. I'm in the process of moving personal stuff into this site.