The past week has been completely hectic with being in the middle of a new website build in conjunction with nzime, on the new Beowulf Racing website. With nzimes fancy design work it was up to me to build the functionality of the site allowing the Beowulf Racing team to update the site as the information comes in.
The blog system is a custom build with permanent URLs using the title as the URL, increasing the pages search rank. On the home page the headlines are pulled from 2 RSS feeds on motorcycle news the 2 top entries are from the British Superbike feed and the 2 bottom entries are pulled from the World Superbike feed keeping the site with up to date information.
The main challenge of this build was the custom built gallery I wrote specifically for this website. It allows creation of multiple galleries and with the use of Imagemagick, automatically resizes and create thumbnails of each of the uploaded gallery images.
The final main piece of functionality for this project was the YouTube videos that are displayed on the home page and videos page. These are automatically updated via the YouTube user RSS feed allowing easy video management via YouTube.
On another note I decided to install VMWare Fusion. The few times I have rebooted into windows it made me feel dirty and I just wanted to be back within the haven that is OS10.5. I am currently trying out the 30 day trial and so far I am very happy. Installation was extremely easy the one roadblock I encountered was that my windows installation on my bootcamp drive had corrupt and required me to restore my last known working configuration (which took all of 30 seconds). Most of the time I have windows running in Unity that allows me to run Windows application within the OSX interface. They don't look as pretty as all Mac windows but they work great non the less.
The current setup gives windows 1 processor and 512MB ram which is more than enough and I haven't even noticed any slowdown in OSX.
The rest of the week will need to be spent working on my Dissertation, Showcase and finishing work for clients so I don't get behind.