robertliu.com

Well I’ve been working on my site again…this was after I managed to get VPN working to my college so I could access journals and papers so I could do some research, without leaving the comfort of my room, for my project. It turned out that the firewall on my Linksys WAG54G adsl router was blocking it. Disabling it made it work instantly. If only I did that last night when I was fiddling around with Window’s Firewall settings and trying to update ZoneAlarm.

So, my entire site should be SEF compatible now. So hopefully Mr Google will come along and browse my entire site. If you’re wondering what SEF is, it’s basically a nicer url in the address bar, something like www.robertliu.com/photos/ instead of www.robertliu.com/photos/index.php?,id=1…. so it’s easy for both human and machine to read. Although the Xaneon component I have installed to manage the urls isn’t perfect, I must say it is doing a pretty good job, and credit should be given to “theGillis” who provided a patch to enable the SEF for my photo gallery. It works great, although I have already spotted a few bugs. Not sure if I’ll have time to find and fix them, but on the whole I can say my site is pretty much finished. Just a matter of keeping the content up to date. I also wish I documented properly everything I did. It’ll probably be useful to me in the near future, and probably to many other people who are trying to develop their own website using Mambo. That’s probably one part of the internet I would like to see improved. Yes, the content is there, but there is quite a lack of quality documentation for many things; I suppose that’s what it’s like for “freeware”.

I’ve got tomorrow and maybe Thursday left in London. Then I go back to Cambridge to help out at my parents take away, and then come back on Sunday to move out permanently from this room. I’m gonna start packing tomorrow, and it could be the last time I see my computer this week. I’m fairly certain I’ll be getting a brand new laptop in September and hopefully my brothers can eBay off my computer for a reasonable sum.

I had only just realised it wasn’t possible to sign my guestbook :/. Now it’s fixed. I think I traced the problem to Xaneon Extensions (beta2) which controls the output of the URLs in the address bar. For those experiencing the same problem with Mambo 4.5.2 and Akobook 3.42 what I did was set Components>Extensions>Features>”Enforce Canonical Urls” to “No”.

This is only a work around and hopefully an updated version of Xaneon Extensions will be released soon. If anyone finds a better solution, let me know!

Apart from that, I’m slowly weeding out all the bugs on my site. Do email me if you find anything odd. I’ve also updated my contact page so you can email me via the form provided. Added some more links and optimised a few more urls for search engines. Blaaaa…

I’m going home for the weekend…to get proper food!! Been a bit lazy with cooking since exams have finished. I would have thought it’d be the other way round?!?Anyway, I’ll be away for a while and currently waiting for adsl to be activated at home, so no internet connection. Still a few things to fix on this website. I’ve tried to install Xaneon Extension component, which helps give nicer url’s for my web pages, which seems to work on the whole, except some of the navigation in my blog doesn’t work properly yet. It would be nice if there was some documentation, but as it is, their website is down, and google doesn’t return anything useful.

Went to play tennis yesterday, which explains why every muscle in my body aches now. I suppose exercise once a year is better than nothing I post a pic next time. Ciao!

Still mucking around with my website. Need to get out more…

As I’m a beginner to cascading style sheets (CSS) I’ve been working a bit slow. (If CSS lost you, then just skip to the next paragraph as the rest is just a technical rant.) But that’s not been the main problem. I’ve discovered that Mambo isn’t quite bullet proof but handles permissions in a perculiar way. I’ve been trawling through forums trying to find solutions or alternatives. I’ve tried a few things which seem to work. I just hope it holds itself together. In fact, I?think it’s not possible to create software that works, is secure and does what the user wants. Microsoft Windows being a prime example. Anyway, I’m getting there slowly and if you happen to be browsing my webpage and it suddenly turns bright PINK, then that would be me trying to figure out which class name controls which particular part of my web page.

As the end of the summer term approaches I’ve also been searching for accomodation next year. As it’s my third year looking for accomodation in London, I can safely say it’s not fun. I saw a flat in Bayswater last week and left my name and number saying I was interested. And just now, the landlord rang me to ask if I was still interested. We’ve scheduled a meeting tomorrow and if all goes well I should have secured a room for September.

The room itself is fairly large, 2 to 3 times bigger than what I have right now. The apartment has two bathrooms a kitchen and 4 other bedrooms. The location is the best part. It’s on Queensway, Bayswater and the entrance to the building is adjacent the Ice Rink and Bowling Alley!!! How cool is that. Aswell as that, there’s a million restaurants and shops along Queensway. So everything you really need is all on one street. Oh, and it’s only 20 minutes walk to college. So I get an extra 10 minutes in bed compared to this year.

Now guess what I’ve got planned for the summer? Holidays in Vienna! Well actually I’m going to visit my girlfriend Katja for a couple of months, but we have a nice holiday planned. I’ll fill you in on the details later, but right now my stomach says it’s dinner time!

Hey all! What do you think of my new website? I decided to give it a more refreshing, brighter look. I’ve changed the CMS from Nucleus to Mambo. I stumbled across it and started playing around with a few demo versions of Mambo and it’s a pretty amazing piece of software. It was everything I had wanted for Nucleus but never knew it existed, until now!

What you see now is my very own template, more or less done using cascading style sheets. After almost a week of messing around with CSS, I think I just about have the hang of it! Any code I have used is shown in the credits section along with the respective authors, just to be complete.

I’ve still got to fine tune a few settings and change the appearance of some parts but apart from that it’s more or less functional. Let?me know what you think?

About myself… well exams finished just over a week ago. I don’t think I did particularly well. In fact, I might have even failed a few, but I’m not thinking about that now. Just wait till the results in July. I’m also supposed to start my final year project in the next few days. It’s mostly just background reading, but we’re expected to come up with a 2000 word literature review before October. Let’s try not to leave it to the last minute, eh?

Ok, just updated website but just realised it’s messed up some of my layout…

argh…1am, can’t be arsed. Will fix/change/renovate site sometime in the near future (hopefully before I graduate).

Good night