Site updates (v5.5)

24 July 2007, 11:13

Yesterday we updated the site.

For this site update we made the following changes:

• Interface updated: more eye candy. It's not a new interface, we like to say it's just better made, smoother, looking much better than the previous interface. With this update we made sure the interface still fits on 800x600 resolutions, and we made several design corrections. The gallery and the blog pages should be much better now.
• The interface now uses more CSS 3 selectors and properties. Try viewing the site with Safari - one of the web browsers which implement text-shadow and box-shadow.
• Handheld and print stylesheets. These are new interface templates.
• The handheld interface is for cell phones, smart phones and anything else connected to the Internet. The site now looks very pleasant on any mobile device. We recommend you to try Opera Mini and/or Opera Mobile.
• The print stylesheet is used whenever you want to print any page from this we site. For this interface we eliminated the navigation menus, leaving just the content, with no fancy graphics.
• New feature: Universal Search. All the search fields in the site provide the following capabilities:
  • You can type "/path/to/the/page/you/want" (for example /mihai/blog). This allows you to quickly and intuitively jump to any web page you want. Do you want to contact me? Just type /mihai/contact and submit.
  • Automatic input completion: you do not need to remember page paths. You will automatically see the available pages everywhere you want. We like Web Forms 2 and for this reason I implemented in JavaScript support for <datalist>. This an implementation which works with any input form, with any external XML document. The implementation makes use of XmlHttpRequest (aka AJAX).
  • automatic input completion also works with page titles. If you want to see the images Marius made, just type "images".
  • Site search, just type any keywords you want and submit. The keywords you type will be searched in page titles and page contents.
  • Google Custom Search Engine. You can search our web site with Google as well. Using any search field in our site, you just have to type "g your keywords" (prefix the list of keywords you want with "g ").
  • Additionally, if you want to go to another external web site, just type www.ubuntu.com (or whatever address you want).
  All of this functionality works even if you have JavaScript disabled. Automatic completion works in web browsers which implement Web Forms 2. Currently Opera 9 implements Web Forms 2, however ... due to a bug Opera cannot load the external XML file.
• Breadcrumb navigation everywhere in the web site. Move the mouse over the title below the logo to see the breadcrumb navigation links.
• A new search field everywhere in the site. When you view the breadcrumb navigation you can click the search icon on left to activate the Universal Search field.
• Several improvements to the Content Management System. In comparison with the initial site release, the CMS now has lots of improvements in the file manager, the Awebitor (my HTML editor). Also, the latest ReTidy script is now included everywhere in the CMS. The generated code is a lot cleaner.
• We've updated several pages and made corrections. One of the pages we updated is the Site timeline.
• Many improvements to the code output. I made sure the code has new lines where needed, making it easy to read. I like clean, readable markup. :)

These changes were made in preparation for two national Romanian contests of informatics: see InfoEducatie and ProInfo.

Published in: maintenance.

New hosting

20 June 2007, 20:14

Hello world!

This site was kindly hosted by a company in Bucharest. On 26th of May the company was required to move to a new location. We were not announced and they took no measures for ensuring server uptime. The unfortunate coincidence was that the national Contest of Applied Informatics was held on that specific date. As visitors of this web site know, we host the web site of this contest and the associated forum. Unfortunately, we were not announced that the server will be moved to a new location.

The big problem is that the Internet service provider has not yet installed the connection at the new location. This is why we decided to buy a hosting plan from Dreamhost. So, here we are, on a new server. Big thanks go to Lucian Marin!

For now we were able to only upload our site and the Henri Coandă highschool site. For all the other web sites we have no updated backups and we cannot upload them on the new server. Once we get access to the server in Bucharest, we will make all the web sites available again.

We apologize for any incoveniences the server down time have caused. This is certainly an unfortunate coincidence.

Published in: dreamhost, maintenance.

Web 5.0

18 February 2007, 14:30

Hello and welcome to the new ROBO Design web site, version 5.0!

This blog post is not about a new trend, Web 5.0. The title is intended to be funny. :)

What's new and changed:

• The backend is completely new. Work on this backend was started with the PRO-net web site, and continued with several other sites.
• The site is now only available in English. Parts of it are in Romanian. This is a "mixed language" site. We no longer have time and interest to maintain the entire site in both languages.
• All pages have been reorganized and updated. We didn't like our previous web sites for the lack of focus: the ROBO Design studio, or the ROBO Design twins with their works. We've now made it clear: the ROBO Design twins present their works.
• We've changed the site interface (obviously). Finally, something clean and simple, fast loading pages.
• Permanent links for those about to rock. :)
• Users can no longer post comments on this site, as on the old site. Spammers have abused the previous site. Astute visitors of the previous web site already noticed we've disabled the feature of comment posting. The "send me a comment" feature in the blog and in the gallery allows the visitor to quickly and easily send us an email about anything he/she wants.
• Many of my old blog posts from My Opera have been added into this blog, as a backup. Small cosmetic fixes for some posts.
• Content Management System. Now Marius can also update the site. For me it's just easier and faster.
• Throw a party: Internet Explorer was not ignored by us. The site works properly in IE 6 and IE 7. Sadly, getting the site to work took me some time.

To see what's new for Marius, take a look at this blog post. He has lots of new content. Most of my content is new. :)

Make sure you check out the site timeline and the radio dedications (both posted by Marius).

For web developers

Given this site will be visited by some web developer experts and "wanna-bees", I consider necessary to provide some technical details about this web site.

If you will try to validate this site, you are bound to find invalid pages. I don't value validation as much as I did once. This doesn't mean I've given up on web standards, not at all. On the contrary, I've learned that validation is not the only path to a better Web. I will generally try to keep the site valid - closed tags, no presentation markup, etc.

I don't use XHTML. Simple web pages which do use it almost automatically label the authors as "beginners", or at least guys who want to be "cool". I used, and I will continue to use XHTML if needed.

Some pages won't validate "thanks" to the home-grown WYSIWYG editor integrated into the CMS of the site. Given time, I will probably integrate my existing page cleaner script into the CMS. For those who don't know, I have a page cleaner script which fixes tons of problems in pages generated by WYSIWYG editors, Office applications (e.g. OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word). The script is already tested on hundreds of A4 pages of Word documents. The results were quite amazing: very clean documents. More details will probably be posted on this blog.

Another reason for invalid pages is something really simple: some pages do use Web Forms 2. Maybe some HTML 5 as well.

Conclusion

Last, but not least, we'd like to thank Mobius Solutions for hosting this web site.

Thanks for stopping by and for visiting our web site. Expect more updates.

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are greatly appreciated!

Published in: maintenance.