How about a comeback

This site has been largely abandoned, I know, trust me. As a matter of fact it has been down for most of this year – but life has been just too hectic, and the things I put in motion over the last year or so left little or no time to finish up what I started over here. Anyhow, without further ado, here are the things which are new and why it took so long.

First, for those who remember from a long time ago, this site originally started out on Mambo CMS. Eventually, Mambo split into several branches, derivatives, or competitors, depending on how you want to look at it. At which point, I moved the site over to Joomla 1.5 back in 2010. Since then Joomla has come a long way, and I've watched a lot of the progress with enthusiasm, however, I used a lot of modules, galleries, plugins, and components, all of which failed to keep pace with the evolution of Joomla. Not to mention, the Joomla team has not made it very easy to migrate from one major version to the next without significant effort.

After a while, the 1.5 version of this site became long in the tooth, thus at some point I decided to take the plunge and migrate to 2.5, then 3.0, and eventually 3.1. I gave up on just about most plugins and component bridges, since it was just too much change too handle. I did hang on to all of the content though, since it goes back almost a decade now and is worth preserving. I will be reformatting most of it to play nice with the new template, and will be bringing it back on-line over time.

So what's new other than Joomla 3.1? First is the template from the good folks at Rocketthem, which they released as part of the freely available Gantry framework. It in turn utilizes the Bootstrap framework which makes it fairly nice and responsive, at least in most modern browsers. Next, I wrote a couple wrapper plugins for Joomla which incorporate the Magnific Popup lightbox by Dimitry Semenov. It is one of the few responsive lightbox scripts which I've found that work well with mobile devices. It runs on top of jQuery or Zapto, and seems to play fairly well so far with the rest of the components on this site. Rather than relying on separate gallery components I will just incorporate pictures in the articles themselves from now on. The quantity will be less but hopefully the quality will be better. Anyhow, that's all for now folks!^[1]