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07/19/2001 Archived Entry: "Mars Development"

I've been working on the Mars Society UK Development Site Mark 2 for the last few days now ('Mark 2' sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?). The first Development Site took me quite a while to build since I'd never worked with PHP before and as it used PHP-Nuke 4.4, which is as bug-ridden a piece of software I've ever come across, things weren't made any easier for me. After far too trying to figure out what various unlikely pieces of code did and didn't do, I simply gave up and left the site half-finished.

Fast-forward a few months and I find myself with a few problems. First, the site still isn't finished - there's no rush but I'm always reminded of my failure every time I look at the Mars Society sites and shudder in distaste. Second, at the end of this month I discover that we'll be moving web hosting services, getting credit card processing facilities and receiving a few thousand Mars maps for sale. So to ease the transition and to preclude having to update the website one more time than is strictly necessary, I decided to get a move on and finish off the site.

I wasn't looking forward to it, since the memory of developing the first site had grown steadily darker and more horrible in my mind with every passing day of my giving up. Luckily though a whole new version of PHP-Nuke had been released with all the bugs ironed out and a whole host of nice features that made my life a lot easier. In but a couple of days I managed to get a lot of work done.

At that point, it was suggested to me that I should change the website background to black. Now, when I had to do that the first time around, I ended up spending far too long messing about with font tags and colours on every single page of the site. This time I just changed a CSS file (d'oh!).

Anyway, it's looking quite nice now and most importantly it doesn't look identical to Slashdot. In fact, with the various things we're going to do with the sidebar and front page, it'll look pretty damn nice. 'Functional and nice?' I hear you cry, 'how is that possible?'

Search me.

By the way, if anyone knows what the name of the font used in the top 'Mars Society' banner in the website is, please let me know. If you have the font, that's even better.