Welcome to the NEW stevedrice.net

Out with the old…

…and in with the new…

I am sure you can agree this is an incredible leap forward in many ways.

Well, after about 200 man hours I am pleased to finally have this massive re-write of my web site finally available to everyone. There have been massive amounts of changes to my previous site including dramatically improving the way the site looks including providing extensive support for mobile phone (and smaller device) users.

The new site has more than 1,780 pages including 762 pages on travel, 335 book reviews, 220 film reviews and 225 restaurant reviews.

I hope you find the site helpful and enjoyable. Please be sure to let me know what you think.

Steve

P.S. If you are interested in further details of this update, read on…


Ethos

When working on this new web site I had the following priorities:

  1. Bring the look and feel up to date using the latest web page technologies
  2. Remove links to web sites that are no longer available (broken links)
  3. Provide support for mobile phones and smaller displays such as tablets including not only what the pages look like but also the size of pages by splitting up large pages into multiple, smaller, pages
  4. Make it easier to find things
  5. Make it much more visual with lots of pictures
  6. Make the information present more up to date
  7. Removal of obsolete information (requiring review of ALL content)
  8. Add “event reviews”

Technical Notes

This upgrade has included the following technical changes:

  1. Upgrading to the latest version of DokuWiki including
    • Installation and modification of the BootStrap3 interface template
  2. Conversion of site to use “REST” syntax for all URLs
    • URLs are now much simpler and easier to understand meaning that people should be able to more easily understand the site and point to it…
  3. Conversion of all custom modifications into DokuWiki plugins
    • There are NO changes to the primary DokuWiki source code
    • Should make future upgrades of DokuWiki much simpler
  4. Scanning of all pages for broken links (then manual removal)
  5. Add “Semantic Web” support to all reviews and the home page
    • This should improve rankings on global search engines
  6. Update of reviews so that they are no longer solely in MySQL but now also written to disk so that they better integrate into the DokuWiki search engine
  7. Increased cross-referencing of reviews including:
    • Links on film reviews to other films I have reviewed that have been directed by the same person
    • Links on book reviews to other books I have reviewed by the same author
    • Addition of “area” pages in the restaurant reviews so that you can see all restaurants in the same area
    • Addition of “list” pages for all review sections so you can have a simple, pageable list of all relevant reviews
  8. Improvements of HTML to be as standards compliant as possible

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank both Lee Hoang (web WIZARD) and my wife, Melanie, for their help and support over the past few months. I hope they are happy with the results.