The website upgrade is almost complete. I’ve made some major changes to the way the news system works and looks (if only on an ‘internal’ and structural basis) and many subtle changes to the functionality of my website here and actually have all the pages TWiki-fied. I’ve taken some time after getting the pages there to make minor modifications to a) speed up things and b) eradicate extra stuff I don’t need (e.g. duplicate code).
Tonight was spent making adjustments to the web preferences (on the beta version hosted on my localnet) to make things look slightly different than the default elsewhere. I also did some fiddling with Apache directives that I’m going to need when I make the complete change from traditional HTML to TWiki. This way I’ll still be able to publish my web address as http://mzonline.com/zaskem without the need for complicated (and sometimes flaky) redirects (as I’ve used elsewhere) which don’t have the desired effect I’m looking for. I’ve come up with a nice alternative which has allowed me to a) redirect all *.html pages in an area to default to the new WebHome for Matt’s Home on the Web (the soon-to-be main page of my website) while allowing me to continue using the tried and true directory structure for keeping website images and whatnot (less mess).
Anyway, my goals for the completion of this upgrade are as follows:
- Sometime this week make a tarball of the ‘beta’ version of Matt’s Home on the Web, moving it over to the public TWiki installation.
- Unpack the tarball in a temporary test web where I can make final adjustments I missed locally (a key part which shouldn’t take long if I’ve done everything correctly in beta versions).
- As soon as everything’s looking good, create a tarball of the existing Zaskem web, removing files after transferring the tarball offline and then renaming the test web to Zaskem.
- Setting up the Apache configuration file to do redirects and access-like control.
- Creating a tarball, transferring said tarball offline, and removing all existing *.html pages currently in /zaskem, thusly completing the upgrade.
I’m probably still looking at another week or so before going completely live with the new website, mostly due to my personal schedule and other commitments; however, it’s coming soon. 
And aside from keeping the news system working in duplicate (I have to add news items to both the current public web and my beta test web), it’s not that big of a pain. 
I’m excited for the change — and if all works well, I plan to do the same for my Monty Python website over the early part of summer 2003.
This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07