A real short one today only to point out that the contents of noswad.me.uk have moved to ad7six.com. You are unlikely to notice the difference as (surprise, surprise) you'll get redirected automatically.

There was a time when this site was 100% xhtml valid. It didn't last long, as as soon as I forgot to correctly close a tag anywhere on the page, or added some beta-ish new functionality, or updated my cake version inevitably something became invalid. I used the Xhtml Validation helper for a while, but the messages it generated got in the way rather than helping. I still use it for certain tasks, such as checking comments and these blogs for well-formedness, it's a handy class of that there's no doubt but not the way I was trying to use it.

For this site my primary concern is that the code is at least well-formed and preferably 100% valid (xhtml). But rather than trust the W3 Validator to tell me my pages are fine; there's a much faster way to both detect and prompt fixing fundamental errors: Public Embarrassment.

After a while in development, I have updated the site to a new look and some leaner code. The things I've been working on for the past few weeks are:

• Implement full version control for the source.
• Make the site valid XHTML.
• Replace the use of external libraries with Cake functions where possible.
• Redesign the look for the site.
• Make it possible to customize the look of the site (colours!).
• Redesign the structure of the code for the site.
• Make use of data caching.
• Do some optimising to try and get display times sub 1s.

Well I hit a few problems when I moved the site contents to the live server, there's always something that catches me out developing on (case-insensetive file system) Windblows and deploying to (case-sensetive file system) linux. But hey, now the site is back ;)

The pope has been in town this weekend, and like most locals, we took the opportunitiy to escape to the hills.