After nearly 2 years without a proper functional website I have finally got my finger out and created a masterpiece, I’ve made many versions over the months, some got shelved because I didn’t like them, others got shelved because of technical reasons, but I bring you my new site. There is everything you can expect from a portfolio site, showcase of my work, a selection of my photos and a bit about me.

My site and Blog now share a common theme, improvements to the blog are ongoing, the tags need to be sorted out – the archive pages aren’t working properly and there are a few IE6 problems, but the site runs fine on IE7 and Firefox so I’ve decided to roll it out now and sort out any bugs as they arise.

Before you ask, yes the banners on each page were taken by me. The one for this blog was taken on the Rockefeller Centre in New York City, one of my personal favourites.

As you may have noticed from things breaking on my blog I’m making improvements and changes to both my blog and gallery.

The technical Issues with my Gallery have now been fixed, however I’m going to have to upload all of the photos again so it may take a few days to a week until that is all sorted out.

Among the things that I am working on is a better layout for the blog posts / Tag cloud and hopefully a new design.

So just to warn you, don’t be surprised if things look a little funky at times.

Well i’ve finally taken the plunge and am trying to get my .com sorted out.

Gone are the days where www.mylesnoton.com redirects to http://myles.crosswaysandseaview.co.uk

From this day forth (if it all works) you will only be able to access my site through www.mylesnoton.com, those who have subscribed to my RSS feed will have to either update the url or re-add the feed, the new url is http://www.mylesnoton.com/blog/?feed=rss2

The move may take a day or so for the nameservers to sort themselves out so keep trying

Referral Logs are interesting, some of the time they show absolutley nothing of interest, others they make you sit and stare at the screen for a few moments while your mind works out the chances of you being unconscious and dreaming up what you see in front of you.

Some people love referral logs though, they love them so much they even include them in podcasts and call the segement Google Weirdos.

Just as a side not: I like my writing style, it allows me to take a boring and otherwise uninteresting thing and turn it into a 3000 word essay, even though most of you probably consider this a pain.

But anyway, I digress…

This morning while I was carrying out my normal daily blog stats check, I stumbled upon something that even at this moment is still confusing me:

Looks like I have some followers at Disney….

And yes shane, that is a referral from your blog

Years ago, probably around 1999 was the year I started trying to learn how to make websites, at the time I knew nothing, I didn’t know my HTML from my thumb, and if you’d asked me anything about some of the stuff that I’m doing now I would have gone to the nearest edge and chucked myself head first over it, the idea of a professional site was merely a concept that hadn’t yet been explored or absorbed by the deepest darkest parts of my mind, or by anyone that I knew, and while we all thought that what we were making was professional enough we were blinded by all of the flashing free animated gifs that we managed to ‘scrape’ from places like FlamingText.

Recently I came across some of the old sites that I made ‘way back when’ and after I’d managed to recover from the severe illness and convulsions that they caused I started to question my design principles at the time.

For the record, I would like to apologize to all of the people that visited any of my sites during those times, I feel you’re pain I honestly do.

I don’t know when it all started, the idea was probably drip fed to us over the long and dull lessons that we used to have, a subliminal message here and there and we would believe anything, looking back on it, clipart and animated gifs should never have been invented, regardless of our slow and unwittingly reliance on them. There was a trend among my original sites, a lot of them had very little thought put into them, things were put on the page on a ‘yeah that fits that space’ basis, there were no actual structure and certainly no forethought about things like design, usability or user experience.

The first ever attempt at web design that I ever made was a website made in word, now before you say anything I would like to take the opportunity to say that I have been punished for my sins back then, and I regret nothing…well actually I do, but that’s not the point.

Unfortunately the original files for most of the early websites I made were lost in an ‘accidental’ fire along with all of the really embarrassing pictures of me when I was younger, but I’m sorry I can’t share these masterful creations with the rest of the world…damn I feel so upset

After I moved on to FrontPage…don’t start, this was a more of a liberating experience since I actually had some tools to work with…just.

Later I moved onto more industry standard tools, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash were my weapons of choice, this was a big part of the learning curve and where I began to learn most of what I know now, at least in Photoshop and Dreamweaver anyway, flash is a different thing altogether.

Then recently I have moved away from Dreamweaver in response to the release of Visual Studio 2005, it is only now that I am starting to fully understand web standards and what it is to design good websites.

So here is the hall of fame, or more precisely, the hall of shame:

This was probably the first website I’d ever made, as you can see there is absolutely no structure to it what so ever, it’s pretty poor, and it’s made with geocities, that alone should be enough to put me into exile

This was made in FrontPage, I’m not proud of what I did, and yes, unfortunately this did go live for a short while

It’s starting to get better, admittedly not much better…

Getting better…

And finally this is the current design…much better in my opinion

First version of my portfolio site, see I learned, kinda

This is the second version, still learning

And here is the version I’m working on now, much better don’t you think?

Now that Visual Studio 2005 has been released I have been able to make considerable improvements to my site, for a long time now (probably about a year) I have been trying to update it with all sorts of weird and in the end not achievable designs punctuated by Lloyd telling me to make a new version and actually publish it.

One of the things that I wanted to do was build the site in ASP.NET, and then use SQL Server to build some rather nice web apps, but when I looked into it a lot of the stuff in .net 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003 was broke and I didn’t have the knowledge to work out ways around them, so I decided to wait for .net 2.0 and VS 2005.

And I have to say that it is nearly ready to be released, I just have to finish adding some content and fix a few bugs then it will be ready to go live, oh yeah, there’s 1 other thing, I’m waiting for my host to install the .NET framework 2 on their servers, unfortunately this is going to take at least 6 – 8 weeks, so once it’s installed I will deploy it almost immediately.

So far the new version just contains a new layout and design, but behind the scenes I have done things to enable myself to build up applications on top of it and to make sure that content is easily updatable (unlike my previous versions that were a real pain to update any of the content), something that took quite a lot of fiddling to get right. Unfortunately most of the layout is still done with tables, but I have tried to implement more CSS than previous versions, currently my CSS file stands at a little over 300 lines of code, and that is without any layout elements, but as time goes on, and my knowledge increases I of course will be updating things.