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Michael Duerinckx
is a (mostly front-end) web developer for Carswell Gould. Other than web development he is into electronics design as well as music production.
All content by Michael Duerinckx unless mentioned otherwise.

Posts in ‘Meta’

New hosting!

Although you may not see any difference, this site is now hosted elsewhere. It’s taken over a week to get all the administration dealt with, but now it seems to work all okay.

Michhimself.com used to be hosted by one.com, the first web host I ever paid for, which I registered with in 2009. Back then, the simple PHP/MySQL hosting with FTP access was great, but I’ve since moved on.  Since it was so-called ‘shared hosting’, it meant that multiple websites would run on the same server; meaning that the performance of my site would depend on the load caused by others.

Now I’ve moved on to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at linode.com, where I get full root access over the machine. You know what that means: a LOT more freedom to play with. I got to install the web server software myself, as well as PHP, MySQL and a bunch of other things. I’m even running an IRC bot on the thing. Needless to say, I no longer need to use FTP to access the files on this server; I just use SSH, which is more secure, and seemingly faster as well. Have I mentioned that Linode is fabulous?

A fresh new look

Posted on: by Mich 1 Comment

It has been far too long since I last updated, and that’s not just because I forgot about it; I’ve been putting it off. Lately, I’ve had quite a couple of ideas to blog about, but I just didn’t want to because I had grown so tired of the dark design I made. I guess it was sort of stylish, in its own way, but I’ve started liking bright colour schemes better.

Therefore, before I wanted to blog again, I wanted to make it look pretty to look at; as you can see, I went for it and finished it; I’ll leave it up to you whether or not I succeeded.

I decided to finally jump on the bandwagon and do it all in HTML5, rather than the good ol’ XHTML. I think browser support for HTML5 is getting big enough to really start using it as the main technology in webpages; besides, it’s easy to set it all up so older browsers display everything all right as well.

My starting point for this custom theme was HTML5Reset‘s ‘empty’ WordPress theme. It’s basically a very basic theme, with minimal styling, so you don’t really need to actually get rid of anything to get it the way you want. It was very easy to work with, and I’m happy with the result.

What’s left

Now as you may have noticed, at the moment of writing, I’ve only redesigned the blog; the rest of my site still bears the dark brown design. I’ll be redo-ing my portfolio as well as the front page in this style, so it all matches. There are a couple of menu options up there in the navigation that don’t work properly yet too (most importantly, the ‘Music’ one), so I’ll be working on that as well.

Either after or before that, I’ll write a bit more about all the things I’ve been up to. It’s quite a bit.