Monthly Archive for January, 2008

RAID and extra storage

Published on 11th January 2008 in News. Closed

Something I have been thinking of doing for a while was to upgrade the server’s hard drive storage. At the moment it has a 200GB hard drive that is about 80% full. As I have a linux shop and the server is sometimes used as a backup for other computers on the network I have decided to by a 500GB hard drive. To make the new upgrades to the server future proof so that when the time comes to upgrade to a new server I will be able to use some of the parts from the old, I have bought a SATA hard drive. Due to the server not having any SATA ports on the motherboard, or for that matter most other I/O ports, I have bought an Adaptec SATA RAID card to go in the server. This will allow me to add 2 SATA hard drives to the server and these should preform just as fast, if not faster than the current IDE hard drive.

This will mean that at some point, probably next week, the server will be down while I upgrade the kernel and install the new SATA controller and hard drive.

Cosmo version 9 – CSS

Published on 10th January 2008 in News. Closed

After I started to make the new version of the site I designed to give up on the new design as I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted. As the current site already has a simple but nice design I designed to stick with that. I have remade the site based on that layout from scratch and it has taken be about 3 hours to do all of the CSS. I have no doubt that once I start to add content and test it in other browsers there will be more work to be done on the CSS but for now I am happy with the outcome.

As the code is made from scratch instead of being copy and pasted it allows me to make it much cleaner and remove any patchy parts where changes had been made in the past. I have also changed the way the the elements of the site are positioned on the page by not using position: absolute apart from on two parts where it is the only possible way to get the style wanted without it being fixed to a bad position on the page. A new logo has been made which is basically me writing “Cosmo” on a tablet. The entire site as it stands at the moment is 100% code with any graphics being SVG files. The XHTML needs to be validated but for now I will work on the back end of the site which I hope will be based on Ruby on Rails but if I am unable to do that I will fall back on PHP.

Cosmo version 9

Published on 1st January 2008 in News. Closed

This is the latest version of my personal website. They normally last as long as the server or until I make any major change to the style or running. The new version will include smooth new SVG graphics and will hopefully be powered by Ruby or at the very least cleaner PHP. As with every website I make it is better than the last in some way as I work hard on improving my skills and knowledge base whilst working on new sites. I have been working a lot with Ruby on Rails recently and I would like the website to run on that. This will require a learning curve as I’ve not made a site using RoR before. I will also need to get Apache HTTPd to server ruby files. I will also have a change log with the site.