New features or changes on Michael’s Piece of the Web
Unless you’ve spent the past few days in a cave, you know that the City of New Orleans has basically been wiped out by the flooding that has followed Hurricane Katrina. I just added a llink to the American Red Cross to the homepage. Please use it to donate to the massive relief effort in New Orleans and the surrounding areas, including Mississippi and Alabama.
You may have noticed that the homepage is kind of torn apart at the moment. Hopefully you also noticed that the whole site has a slightly new look. The elevator buttons are gone! I liked them and a few people complimented me on them, but they were too big and weren’t easy enough to use to navigate through the site. Hopefully you’ll find the new design easier to use.
The homepage will be done soon. I was going to wait until it was done to upload the new pages, but I think most people look at the other pages more anyway. If you have any suggestions about what conent I should put on my homepage e-mail me and let me know.
My site is currently hosted a company called VizaWeb. They provide good service, but they seem to be having some growing pains. Many people, including myself, switched to them because they were recommended by technology guru, Leo Laporte. The onslaught of new customers seems to be causing problems. I’ve experienced some downtime as a result.
What I’m asking of you is that if you see my site is down or unreachable, please e-mail me and let me know. If you don’t know my address you can use my contact form once the site is back up. You can also post it in the comments of this entry.
Thanks!
Using I set up my site with Google’s new service, Google Sitemaps. It should result in better indexing of my site by Google. This means you’ll get more accurate results and some of the lag I’ve mentioned before will no longer be a problem when I make changes.
One of the benefits of having an actual blog is that it has an RSS feed. There’s a feed of my posts as well as feeds of comments for each post.
For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, it’s a feed that can be read by a news aggregator. Basically, you get information from a bunch of websites at once. The program collects the items and displays them for you. I personally check about 50 feeds everyday. I could never visit all of those websites, but its only takes a few minutes to scan through the list of items in my news aggregator.
For more info on RSS visit Wikipedia’s article on news aggregators. They even list some good choices. Personally, I use NetNewsWire for Macintosh.
Once you have a program up and running, subscribe to my feed at http://www.michaelgatti.com/blog/feed.
Or subscribe to my comments feed at http://www.michaelgati.com/blog/comments/feed
You might have noticed that this blog looks much diffrent than before. I installed some new software this weekend. Now it’s running on actual blogging software. The one I chose is WordPress. I saw it demonstrated on Call for Help on G4-TechTV Canada. So far, I like it. I’m slowly getting the hang of editing the CSS and PHP files to customize the look and feel. I think you’ll see the Blog become a bigger part of the site now that it’s a million times easier to update!
If you’ve tried using the Google Search box on my homepage lately, you may have noticed a lot of broken results. When I updated my site, I changed the directory structure and until the Googlebot crawls my site again, Google’s indexing still points to the old files. They usually crawl the site at least once a month so you should see it updated anytime now.
It’s done! I just finished updating my geneaology website, The Gatti Family Tree. It’s all new from the ground up. Besides having a whole new look, it has a lot of new content. Check its homepage for more details.
I switched to Adobe GoLive as my web site software. I was previosuly using an ancient program called Claris Homepage. It just couldn’t keep up and it didn’t run under OS X. Whle I was moving it over I made a lot of changes to the site. Many of them are asthetic changes and behind the scenes stuff, but I did change a few things that you might want to know about:
– added more photos to the Photos section (Food, Washington DC Trip, Willow Grove Air Show)
– added a google search to the site on the homepage
– added this blog
– added some links and removed others
– added a section in Links to collect the sites I talk about in this blog
I also corrected many formatting problems.
Those of you who use my family tree site… It will be updated next!
The reason I’m bringing back this feature is that I recieved a complaint or 2 after my new site didn’t contain anything like this. I’m sure I will still be slow in updating it, but at least it’s back and we’ll see what happens.