Just a short message: My previous website, Lazaryn.com, is no longer owned by me. I let the domain expire a few months ago and it has since been squatted by a third party. I still have the old site data sitting on my local server but as it was basically just used as an online diary I don’t think I’ll be uploading it anywhere.

On a completely unrelated note I am really no longer interested in website development anymore—instead of working on Undefined Fire in my spare time I am now helping out on the KDE as a core developer, currently focusing on KWin compositing and effects for KDE 4.2. If I am ever required to release feature examples or special “behind the scene” footage I will convert this site into a development log with v5, most of the code and design-work is finished but I just haven’t ported all the existing content over to the new system as it’s structured entirely differently.

Until next time.

After seven long months in development, Undefined Fire v4 is finally here. I have to apologise for the long delay but to be completely honest I had lost 100% of my motivation to continue website development, even though I wanted to get it out sooner I just couldn’t open my editor.

With all major version releases of the site there is a design and back-end change. As I’m a spontaneous designer I can’t really make any comments on why I designed the site the way it is as I completely threw away my plan a few hours after I started creating the mock-up in The GIMP (Yes, I’ve finally decided to move to free software, however it was not a smooth transition and I’ll be outlining the reasons why in a future post). Usability-wise I’ve tried to address the common problems with general blogs and personal websites by adding different graphical emphasis to different parts of each article as well as adding a lot more links between pages on the site.

“Using a DRY programming philosophy with the object-orientated Python language rewriting the entire site from scratch went quickly and smoothly.”

On the back-end site of things I’ve thrown out all my ugly PHP and carefully replaced it with beautiful Django code. I have to say that as soon as I saw Django I was in love as everything just made sense. Using a DRY programming philosophy with the object-orientated Python language rewriting the entire site from scratch went quickly and smoothly. Django’s built-in admin panel was just icing on the cake, no longer do I need to spend half my time writing pages that only I will see. There was a slight problem with the first revision of Undefined Fire v4 as the article section and code library (Which I merged with the article section in the second revision) required recursion-compatible code. As Django does not support this out-of-the-box I ended up writing a stupidly simple template tag that did it all for me. After doing a quick Google search it looks like Django still doesn’t really support it (This looks interesting though) so I’ll release the tag sometime in the near future.

Well I guess that’s it for now, I hope this post has brought happiness to those select few that still have me in their feed readers (My daily visits have dropped to almost nothing due to my inactivity). I will be doing a lot more non-website software development and electronic design this year than in the past so hopefully I’ll have more to write about. One of the other main reasons why I never posted anything last year was because everything I decided to write about was already described adequately on other sites. Oh well, I guess I need to compete with others to get up in the world.

Once again I have felt the need to change the direction of this site, so here it is, Undefined Fire v3. You will notice quite a few modifications with this version, including but not limited to:

• a new design,
• a change of point-of-view from third- to first-person,
• content will be more about what I do and not just things related to website development and design,
• an about page (Finally!), and
• the informal blogging as returned.

I will be adding a commenting system whenever I believe it would be useful. The system I have planned is more of a mixture of your traditional blog comments and a forum, this way it’s possible to have visitors add extra information to the entry/article yet also allow multiple discussions to be held without confusion. Maybe I’m just thinking too big? Will Undefined Fire really get that popular that everyone wants to comment? It’s unlikely, but I still like to be one step ahead of everyone else.

The old Undefined Fire v2 in it’s final state can be found here.