Lokorin.com: Progress
Move complete
This site has now switched domain from www.lokorin.com to lokorin.org. The reason is that I don't like the superfluous www and that this site has never been commercial (although I doubt top level domains are attributed especially much semantical meaning these days).
The old domain can still be used, but it redirects here instead.
Sitemaps
Every once in a while I enjoy doing some white hat search engine optimizing around here. I previously seem to have missed google sitemaps though.
Needless to say a module for sitemaps has been created for the site. I just wanted to share the sitemap link, in case I'm not the only one who missed it.
New look
Welcome to Lokorin.com, now with a new look; I hope you like it. I wanted to remove the gray details (borders, background) and replace the overwhelming amount of shades with just one or two shades of each color. I also wanted to keep the black text on white background as I find it fitting. Personally I think that the new look feels more alive than the previous one.
Before
After
There have also been some minor changes around the site, mostly related to how the news and project descriptions are generated and displayed. I still have some tweaks on my to do list, but probably nothing that will be worth a news entry.
I suspect that this look will last about 6 months, then there will be another round of rewriting and redesigning.
Moving on to the fun part
Lokorin.com has now also been converted to my current PHP 5 standard, the documentation and source code have been synchronised. I might have missed something, so if you see an unhandled error or stack trace hanging around then please copy and report it.
Otherwise I'm done with the dull conversion part, and am therefor moving on to the part where I get to improve things. I have no big obvious things on my to do list, so it will probably be minor changes here and there. Suggestions about things that should be added or improved are always welcome.
I'm probably also going to take a look at the design of this site. Personally I'm quite happy with how it is at the moment, except for a couple of details that I might change. I don't really see me changing the layout at the moment, but maybe I will try out a couple variants for the fun of it.
Future plans
The DKP Log Parser project should be fine for a while, so I'm turning my attention to other projects. More specifically I'm going to work on improving DFCrafters and Lokorin.com (this site).
The last time I cleaned the sites I had a future migration to PHP 5 in mind. I currently have the time, and PHP 5 is stable enough, so I'm formally switching over from 4.x to 5.x . Some might want to take a look at a good article about PHP 5 (albeit a bit outdated) to get an understanding of the changes. The improvements that I like the most in PHP 5.x are probably the object model (which makes me feel at home, as I primarily use Java) along with the error handling system with exceptions (once again inspired by Java).
So how much work has to be done to migrate? Not a lot in my case. The pages are already built with an OO approach (just take a look at the source code), so I will mostly be searching and replacing keywords. I will also take the opportunity to test some new ideas (in order to not fall asleep).
As usual DFCrafters will be first and will be used as a small scale testing ground before Lokorin.com .