Homepage changes
It’s been almost two years since my main site went online. While I was in the planning and preparation stages I decided that I would use Mediawiki as my content management system. While an unusual choice to make for a personal website I figured that it would be perfect for what I wanted and I haven’t been disappointed.
One of the first things that I had to consider was that as I was not going to be running a wiki, I needed some way to control access so that only I could make changes. Luckily this is pretty trivial and only involves adding some lines to mediawiki’s configuration file. But not long after the site went online I noticed that the very first person who left a comment on my blog also created an account on the wiki and they made a few contributions too. All good too I might add. Nevertheless a few other accounts ended up being created and used to add spam so I had to disable the creation of new accounts. However Dan, if you read this, your account is still enabled. 
Next up was to change the theme. In the time my site has been online I have changed the skin three times and each time they have been the excellent skins created by Paul Gu. Other than the themes, the content of the site stayed largely the same. Some new pages were created and some are quite busy too which led to me start including ads.
I’m not a fan of advertising on sites but I had to make the decision to include just two on the top and bottom of each page in an attempt to recoup some of my running costs. The method I used to display the ads was to create a mediawiki template based on an Adsense tutorial on LukeJ’s site.
Over the Christmas holidays I decided on a revamp as I thought the content looked a little bare. I thought it might be interesting to add a relevant and descriptive icon beside each link. After a bit of research I decided to use the freely available Crystal Icons that you may be familiar with if you use KDE.
Lastly my most recent change came tonight when I added an extension that will parse RSS feeds so that on my mainpage there is a list of my most recent blog entries from both this blog and my personal blog.
With all that done I’m pretty pleased with the design but what do you think?
