Starting this month, the IRC-Junkie Daily will be available to subscribers.

Many changes for IRC-Junkie over the past period, and all have been planned for the next major change in service for its visitors: the move to a newspaper edition.

The new design had to be pushed through in order to make it possible for a consistent housestyle with the paper edition, which is available from now on. The previous design with black background would have cost too much ink, making subscription cost above threshold, which was set at just $9,99USD per month.

Interested visitors can subscribe here.

I’ve made some changes to the site here and there. I hope it fixes some of the problems you guys had.

Biggest change is shifting to CSS. Although I had just 1 report of someone who had a problem displaying the page I hope this is fixed now. For me it was an exercise in CSS as I never did the complete layout of a page in CSS before.

Hope everything works OK

Here we go, all should be working OK. And not a moment too late either!

If you have been frequently visiting the site the past few days you noticed a few glitches. First the HD with the MySQL database went *kapoof*, that was fairly quickly fixed luckily. But then later we got that typical error again phpBB seems to popup regularly and it all went into debug mode.

Just these are reason enough for me to switch. I also started to really dislike the old design. It started to show its age. Add to that that most was standard phpBB skin. Original idea was to design my own template, but you know how those things go. No time, MODs work with default Subsilver skin only, etc. etc.

The site should be fully functional now. Here and there I hacked a bit too hard so over time I should prettify the code a bit more, but it should not really matter or be obvious to you as visitor. I might add some functionality here and there as well. GeniusDex spoke of a software section where developers can add new releases for example. I’ll have to see what is possible in my available time, and other constraints.

If you make use of the RSS newsfeed, be aware the URL has been changed. Although originally not planned to add again, I got quite a response to retain it, so here it is. Its also expanded with the teaser/intro text as you can see on the front page, so you can quickly decide whether to read the whole article or not.

A selection of old news articles have been transferred to the new format. I only kept interesting articles and skipped on the software releases etc. The other articles are more important for archival reasons and referring back to them from time to time. I hope you don’t mind I skipped on the comments.

Last but not least, thanks to you all who have been supporting this website all these years! (has it been over a decade now?)

Its time for a site overhaul again …

I’m a bit tired of having to update the sites underlying phpBB forum code the whole time while its hardly being used, so I’m slowly preparing a complete overhaul. The amount of time to apply the updates is more then my current schedule allows. As such I decides to write my own site from the ground up so I won’t have to apply updates on other people’s crappy code anymore Small and fast PHP the way I want it without workarounds.

I’m going to focus on news, which means some functionality will be removed. Adding comments will still be possible, as I think that gives the possibility for you all to provide feedback which keeps me sharp while writing articles, but it will not be done with forum type functionality. For example no updates on new comments added and other such functionality. You will not have to be registered for adding a comment. It will be more like the system you see in use on other news sites, there’s simply the possibility to add comments and read those made by others without the overkill of a forum underneath.

I’m yet not sure whether to add a RSS news feed again. Is there a need for it? If you use it and hate to see it go, let me know!

Most of the articles (tutorials and such) are heavily outdated, and as you have seen, I rarely have the time to write new articles. Same goes for the links page and other sections. Again, focusing on news, and news alone.

If you have suggestions, idea’s, etc, let me know while I’m still coding. I have no idea when it all might be ready, it can be days or weeks, all depending on available time.

Whee, I became a daddy! Two days ago our son Lucas was born, and both mom and son are doing OK! Forgive me if I am going to be a bit slow from time to time with the news and all. It’s quite bussy over here