Redesign of the Site has been finished
New layout for the site robbychen.com has been uploaded. Here is the change log from beta site RSS feed:
- CA 278 (Web Apps using ColdFusion) page removed, planning to redo it using PHP
- CA 272 page layout updated
- Contact Form fixed
- Updated page layout for About Me
- Subscription links added: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, and Identi.ca
- The pages layout updated, now cover all the edges of the page
- Twitter link is now fixed
- Bottom navbar background updated
- The bottom navbar merged with copyright info bar
- Logo updated
- Horizontal navbar added
- The content of horizontal navbar and sidebar is now MySQL database-driven
- Background updated
New Site Launched
My new website is lunched. It’s beta.robbychen.com. On this website, you can find my latest layout design and site features that will be applied to my main site in the near future. The new site will be updated frequently. It will also have a changelog section where all of the changes (little and large) made on the site will be recorded in the section. I will also provide a separate RSS feed for this site.
Thanks for subscribing to my blog
I just noticed that there are some readers that have subscribed to my blog. This surprised me because I didn’t intend to write much interesting articles about GNU/Linux and other open source related news. Perhaps it’s the result of my commitment to write at least one article on the blog every day during beginning of this week:) Anyway, thanks for the encouragement to give me the opportunity to write better blog posts. If you don’t know my goal of this blog, it’s to improve my writing skill and learn more about GNU/Linux and other open source related news through my opinions.
I also noticed that there are some of my readers still use Internet Explorer. I strongly discourage you to use IE. As you can read on my earlier post, I’ve completely blocked IE users from entering my main website. If any of you are in corporate environment that are forbidden to use third-party browsers, please let me know through comment. I will reconsider opening my website to IE users. Maybe I will use one of the cross-browser CSS frameworks out there. Thanks:)
Use Google Reader to Monitor Web Pages Without RSS
Google Reader recently receives an update. It now has the ability to automatically look for RSS feed once a web address is entered into the Add Subscription box. If it can not find any feed, Google Reader would monitor the web page. According to this Google OS post, the ability to monitor the web page changes is based on the popularity of the web page. However, it cannot monitor the web page that requires user login and the web page that contains frame, and it can only monitor web pages that written in English.
I will stick to Google Reader’s RSS feature. As for some sites without RSS feed, I have been using Update Scanner Firefox Extension before I switched to Google Reader. It can monitor almost anything, including web pages that contain frame and support multiple languages on the web pages. It can also can monitor the pages that require user log in as long as the user is logged in and has the correct cookie information.