Over the last month, I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my website. I’ve had a few lingering issues to take care of. Unsurprisingly, this led me down a few different paths. From simple fixes to big ones, I’ve made a few subtle changes that impact the feel of my site. Hinted at in my change log, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the adjustments made thus far.
Taking a minor departure this Memorial Weekend, my ZX81 program is actually from my childhood best friend. Neighbors during our time in Italy, Jeremy and I spent a lot of time together playing with our LEGO bricks, D&D, and on our computers. U.F.O is a simple shooter game that takes a unique approach to graphics.
You may, or may not, have noticed the lack of writing on my ZX81 site. You might think I gave up, moved, on, or forgot my password. Nope to all three. It’s way worse. I’m changing things up! TL;DR: You can head over to my main site (https://www.reids4fun.
After a serious bout of procrastination, I updated the look of my ZX81 site to match that of my main site. In doing so, I’ve corrected the various errors that cropped up from my hosting upgrade. Clean and comfy, time to enjoy the new features this theme offers.
If you haven’t visited in a while, you may notice that my ZX81 retro computer site is looking a bit different. I’d been using newer, responsive themes, for almost a year now. Yet I was being selfish. The general population wasn't allowed to partake my fun. For the most part, this was due to me not feeling ready. The little bugs I saw prevented me from making progress. The coding perfectionist in me injected doubt which translated into no fun for the masses. No longer.
I’m currently working on a responsive HTML5 template for my website. As much as I like the old one, it is starting to get a bit long in the tooth. Five years of life is a pretty good run, but it is time to get with the modern world full of mobile devices and tablets. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a bit of a pickle.
While searching for some code examples I ran across this inventive hardware expansion. Michel created a ZX81 Nixie Clock and has been kind enough to share his creation with the world through Facebook.
A few things have changed over the list eight years. As I wind down the use of my ZX81 site, incorporating it my main one, much of below is invalid. That doesn’t mean that changes weren’t important at the time. Ideas come and go, and it is good to remember where we came from. Below is a recap of what was.
I finally got around to updating the image and colors for my ZX81 site. I'm using a more muted pallet originated from the pages of the book in the logo. I've decided to keep the same basic layout of the parent site.
I’m in the process of updating the old flat design of this site into a more dynamic one. The original site was designed in the nineties for use on GeoCities and its various requirements and stipulations. Now that GeoCities is dead and the content has been moved to better hosting, I’m taking the opportunity to migrate the site to WebAPP.
Yahoo! will be shutting down Geocities tomorrow, 10/26/09, which means an end to my old LEGO and ZX81 website. Although I hadn’t updated those sites much since Yahoo! turned off ftp access, Geocities had remained my presence on the web for almost 12 years. Sad to say, it will be sad to see it go.
When I added that visitor map yesterday, I wasn’t all that concerned that it used an embed object. That is, I wasn’t concerned till I tried to validate my site. It isn’t something I do that often, but I’d made enough changes that I thought it would be a good idea. I expected a few validation errors, I tend to forget to encode the ampersands in URL’s, but I was surprised about all the errors around the embed tag. I don’t tend to play with plug-in’s myself, so I was blissfully unaware that the standards based tag is object. Although I’m not a big standards freak, I do like to see my pages validate. I was on a mission.