Complete revamp of website appearance. New front page with blog widget and important links. Links on front page have new look. Latest blog posts have custom snippets. Added About and Disclaimer pages. Book reviews have cover images and links to Gutenberg (for public domain books) and Amazon (for copyrighted books). The search results now displays better titles, as well as links from authors and tags. Updated the essays page. Removed the technology section. Added a new Match the Following puzzle. Removed the Word Puzzle.
See the list of best and worst books I read in 2009.
Changed the layout of the home page and the book reviews page. Made minor changes to stylesheets, adding softer borders and other visual effects. Streamlined the code in crossword puzzles using jQuery. Added a new article Becoming a Better Developer. Updated the content in the Movies section. Updated the blogroll and removed the "Other Reading" section in Book Reviews. Added links to most read authors and links to book reviews by ratings. Removed names of favorite authors. Introduced a new screen for searching and displaying book reviews. Introduced a tag cloud to view specific book categories. Created direct links to book reviews.
See the list of best and worst books I read in 2008.
Converted the website to a fully ASP.NET 2.0 driven website. Created a wider layout and changed the fonts and styles. Moved blog to new domain name thoughtclusters.com. Links moved to del.icio.us. Added a new OPML file (since removed) for my favorite blogs and RSS feed for website updates. Added new content to different pages and removed outdated articles and content. Added a new partial Sudoku Solver in the Puzzles section. Wrote a new formatter for displaying the source code of the C++ and Java programs in color. Added a disclaimer. Introduced the top 10 most read blog postings in the Writing section.
See the list of best and worst books I read in 2007.
[See some of the older versions at the Wayback Machine]
My M.Sc. final semester project was building a corporate website. During this time, I became interested in developing my own website.
I registered a site with XOOM, to build a site that would contain information on computer terms.
When I found that lots of sites already contained this information, I lost interest and stopped further development on the site.
After my project, when I went into freelance web-developing, I decided to start again.
I registered another site with XOOM and uploaded 5-6 pages.
Version 1 of the site was a simple site with a lot of text spread over the page and links to other pages down at the bottom.
Initially I put my resume and added my essays and technical articles. I had a section on how to conduct quiz.
Links to other sites including those of my friends were provided. Later, I brought all the links together into a table and
kept this table at the bottom (Version 2). I added C++ and JavaScript programs. A directory structure slowly evolved.
The quiz section was removed as it was incomplete.
XOOM was a good hosting place initially as it had no ad banners. But later a XOOMBar was added and my pages were served up in a frame. This caused issues with my JavaScript programs. Also, files could only be uploaded using FTP.
So I switched my site to Geocities. It was a good thing because XOOM closed its web hosting services soon after that. In Geocities, files can be uploaded through the browser and the popup doesn't get much in the way. I also moved the table of links to the left (Version 3). After this, I changed the background GIF and changed the front design. New sections for jokes, Java, quiz, Prolog, etc. were added (Version 4).
In version 5.0 and 5.1, all unnecessary images were removed. Pages were optimized for speed. Navigation was made easier by providing links to other pages from each page. The front page design was changed. Some new files were added in the articles section.
In version 6, I moved the website from Geocities to a shared hosting site, which had support for ASP.NET.
So I began the process of converting the HTML code to ASP.NET using C# and
leveraging XML/XSLT to drive some of the content.
The quiz pages were changed from client driven JavaScript to server-side C# pages. Additional quizzes were added.
In version 7 (c. 2004), I changed the layout to a blue background. The links went to the top of the page.
I removed the jokes section as I was not sure about the source of some of the jokes and what copyright they may fall under. The JavaScript programs were also discarded along with some essays. Folder structure was redesigned for simplicity and maintainability. Style-sheets were used extensively to provide uniform look and simplify HTML coding. Added "What's New", and "Book Reviews" sections. Added image scorecard in Quiz section, and new crossword puzzle.
In version 8 (c. 2006), I did a major re-arrangement of the content in several pages. I changed the blue background to white. Removed the Prolog and Links section. Added a new Java program for Kruskal's algorithm. Many book reviews were added. Some items were moved to my blog. A blogroll was added. Changed the front page layout with links to book review sections and outward links.
