about the Site | rockhoppersuk

rockhoppersuk.co.uk

Rockhoppers

Update History

• 4 February 2007 - Added more photos of Jack and Jane's wedding photos. Also changed Karen's picture and finally loaded some holiday photos.
• 8 December 2006 - Added Jack and Father Christmas and changed photo of Uncle Rob! Holiday photos still to come.
• 4 December 2006 - Finally uploaded some photographs of Jack, holiday albums still to come.
• 8 November 2006 - Added previous/next buttons to photo albums, added holiday photos and baby photos placeholder.
• 26 September - Changed photo of Karen in About pages.
• 4 July 2006 - Minor updates doing some housekeeping.
• 17 June 2006 - Minor updates, added photo to home page
• 1 June 2006 - Updated the Snake game
• 28 May 2006 - Added Duncan and Caroline's, and Mike and Laurissa's wedding photos to the photo album
• 23 May 2006 - Created a photo album. All photos are available from one page
• 17 May 2006 - Tweaked the CSS and markup after gaining new knowledge
• 1 May 2006 - Relaunched this site - without tables and with meaningful mark-up
• 2005 - Relaunched site with Javascript games.
• 2002 - Launched site with our wedding photos.

About this site

I originally wrote the site using textpad and hand wrote everything. On the last revamp I started looking at PHP and maybe investing in dreamweaver, but decided against it.

As I moved from Microsoft to Java I placed the site in eclipse and played a lot more, but despite the structure of the website being in eclipse it is essentially still hand written XHTML.

I then used eclipse and this site to play with Java and jsp but as I have to pay for the host to enable these they are not out on the web.

At work we are doing an accessibility project, which sparked me into playing again with this site and ripping out all the tables and using css to format the site. I think it works but I am still playing...

I use Firefox as my browser of choice, Karen uses Safari on her ibook and everything works fine. I have briefly checked that everything works as expected in IE6 (the links look a bit odd as IE6 doesn't implement css standards IE7 will though) on windows but if it is not working properly you could do a lot worse than download firefox and use that as your browser...

Why Rockhoppers

When we first ventured online we needed a username, and although we were living together we were not married so a username along the lines of 'Bailey' was out as Karen was still a Ware. So we were sat at the computer looking around trying to find some inspiration when our eyes fell on 'Rocky' a beany baby Rockhopper penguin, and we tried the username rockhoppers and it was free so our web presence since 1999 has been under some variation of rockhoppers, so when we decided to get a some webspace rockhoppers.co.uk was taken so we went for rockhoppersuk.co.uk

A note about CSS and JavaScript

As part of the accessibility project at work we had Andy and Jeremy talk to us from clear:left.

They gave us a couple of lectures on CSS and JavaScript. The outcome of those lectures has inspired me to write proper mark-up and unobtrusive styling and JavaScript. The guys have written a couple of books on the subject which I can not recommend enough - more info can be found on the clear:left website.