Bartimaeus

Some regular readers may have noticed that the layout of these pages has changed.  This has been in the pipeline for much of this year.

When we first came aboard, we decided we wanted to be able to publish tales of our adventures.  With so many other things to deal with as we moved to life aboard, I didn't have time to address the technical challenges, so I settled on using the market leading system with a few tweaks.

This has served us reasonably well, but there have been minor problems.  Many of the features of that system were of no interest to us, but we still had to navigate our way round them.  Much more significantly, it was only possible to work on a new item when we had reasonable network connectivity.  On our travels, we usually have some sort of connection, but there are times when it is patchy at best.

So the top design idea for the new system was: Clare (and I) should be able to easily work on a post when we have no network.

I have some expertise in related areas, and I still enjoy programming, so I hoped it would make an interesting project - which it has.  I identified an over-the-web editing plug-in and wrapped everything else around it.

Everything is stored on a small computer on the boat (we also have one in the Edinburgh flat).  These synchronise with the network server whenever it is available - sometimes in dribs and drabs if the network is patchy.  So as my program makes changes to the local copy of the website, they eventually make their way out to the world.

I chose to make the new system very light weight.  The pages are not generated out of a database on demand, they sit fully formed in files ready to be downloaded (the exception is the page with the map).  This should make the pages load pretty quickly.  It is how almost all pages used to be in the early years of the web.

I found a hyper-legible font provided by the Braille Institute  and chose to use that throughout.  Clare isn't sure she likes the way it displays the digit 0 but the emphasis is on legibility - it looks very different from the capital letter O.

We hope that we haven't lost anything by changing to this new layout.  Let us know if there's something we've missed.