This article is only about my new site here at MJPA.co.uk. I ended up redesigning the site as the previous design was too focused on being a portfolio site and had no proper way of having blog posts or giving more details on the things I have developed. So, here is the new site with both portfolio and blog sections (as well as the old about/contact sections) which are explained in a bit more detail below.
The site design itself is meant to be simple and lightweight and so should load very quickly due to the low amount of images in use. It is designed to work in all the major browsers (IE6+, Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome) with a few graceful degradations for older versions. As of writing this article, the browsers not supporting the CSS border-radius property will get square corners but, time permitting, those will be replaced with an image based workaround.
The site itself is coded in PHP from scratch (no frameworks used) and loosely follows the MVC pattern. The site validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 3 as long as you ignore the errors to do with vendor prefixed CSS properties.
The portfolio section of the site is relatively simple; it consists of a category menu to the left and the projects to the right. By default it will show all the projects I have been involved in unless you select a category on the left. Although the category menu uses JavaScript based effects to filter the projects based on the selected category, it works perfectly fine with JavaScript disabled. Each project listed in the portfolio has a small description about the project and a link to either the respective web site or the blog entry that gives more details about the project.
The blog section of the site is there for me to have a development log of the projects I have worked on. The posts will consist mostly of programs or libraries I have created and rarely will be for a web site. The blog posts will go in to more detail about the project and will be the place to go for real information on the projects as well as watching for any updates to programs I have released.
On every page of the site there is a search box below the MJPA logo which allows you to search the blog, simply enter the terms you wish to search for and click the magnifying glass or press enter. If you enter more than 1 search term, then only blog posts matching all the terms will be returned. If you wish to search for a phrase, surround the phrase in quotation marks (e.g. "localhostr uploadr") and only the blog posts matching the full phrase will be returned. The search algorithm removes any mark up used to format the blog posts before searching so searching for a blog post that links to a certain page is not possible.