Updated Advice Page. New table of contents, Q&As about DVDs to show off your system, and software utilities to make your computing life better. [Not worth a new entry, but on Oct 1st, I also added a new Q&A about digital camera reviews and where to buy.]
HTPC Update and new Hardware Page. The HTPC update lists new hardware I’ve procured since I originally built the system and new software tools I’ve started using lately. The hardware page is basically a home inventory to supplement a video taped walkthrough of the house for insurance purposes. It includes a list of our computers, home theater components, and miscellaneous electronics.
Even cooler new menu. Did I say I had a cool new menu yesterday? Well forget that low-tech piece of junk. Check out the new beauty on the left of the page. The mouseovers still work for highlighting a menu selection, but now there are popup sub-menus for several of the main menu entries. Setting it up wasn’t too difficult as I already had the main button graphics. I just had to decide on foreground and background colors for highlighted and non-highlighted menu selections, and define all the links for the main menu and sub-menu entries. The straight text sub-menus look reasonably good, but I may still make new images for them at some point.
The scripts that do this are freely available by clicking here.
A major site overhaul has taken place. You might not be able to tell at a glance, or even by navigating around the site. I have gotten rid of the “frames”, put everything into a more sensible directory hierarchy, and now almost every page is in its own directory and is an index.html file instead of having dozens of pages in the root directory like photoPage.html and the like. I also added the main navigation menu to most all the pages. That way direct links (like www.brucearmstrong.net/htpc) also have the menu instead of appearing to be a standalone page with no navigation back to the main site.
The menu is somewhat cool in that it auto-scrolls to stay visible as you work your way down a page. I hope to make it cooler with smoother animation when I learn a bit more about DHTML programming.
Lastly, I have moved the older “Site News” entries to an archive, so the main page will load faster, and now get to the good stuff quicker by moving the little intro story to a new “About” page.
Lost photos from the Failed Float Trip. They were sitting in the directory, but for some reason, they weren’t indexed on the page. The second one may be the funniest of them all. Look at Meek laughing like a nut in the background.
