So what exactly changed?

I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest.  I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide.  For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/.  That site helped me a lot!

In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0.  This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website.  This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict.  Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well   You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.

Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened.  On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system.  I wrote a theme for WordPress (thanks to John) and I now use WordPress as my content management system.  Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”.  Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future

Thats all for now.  I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future

Back in high school at Ellicottville Central, I got matthouse.us because I wanted a domain and wanted to start a personal network, thus the matt – house.  My shortened last name is Matt and it is in my house.  Matthouse was never intended to serve personal content, it was mainly for networking and experimentation with a possiblity of future expansion (such as its current use: hosting).

As a result, I wanted a personal site.  I am not a creative person, in fact, I’m quite boring and I will never approach you and offer help, I always will wait for you to approach me and ask for my help.  I’m far too busy normally to want to offer help, yet I am more than willing to help when asked   So back to my site, I was at a loss and asked my creative writing classmates for help.  We spent an entire day as a class of 15 people coming up with a site and concluded with a decision on “phamousphil.com”.

I got the domain that night and started putting stuff on it, but the ph was always confusing to people so I also grabbed the famousphil.com version.  A year later, I ended up sticking with famousphil.com and got rid of phamousphil.com because having 2 sites with the same content would hurt me on google’s ratings.

In the past few months, I have heavily fixed famousphil.com, patching most of the major php bugs and holes in my site that could potentially wipe it from an easy virus.  About 4 months ago, my site had a sql injection to where on any url, you could type “http://famousphil.com/index.php?mode=delete * from *” and it would wipe my site and archives.  Thankfully for 2 years, no one ever did that trick.  I’m sure there were many other bugs also.  I never fixed it sooner because I keep daily backups and it wasn’t a priority until I got the time to properly redesign my site.

So, I’ve put out a little about about the origins of FamousPhil.com and a tiny bug that existed until 3 months ago.  If you are a hacker, don’t you wish you knew that a while back *I am laughing now*.  Things change for the better… “fo sho” -Justin Hyland (amphosted.com).