Well, Christmas was here and gone before I knew it. My daughter turned one this year, so it was all about her! It was a great time, lots of laughs and I got some great gifts. 

Needless to say, there will be a lot more mess in our kitchen over the next few weeks as I experiment with the new toys I got. 

In the new year, some home improvement challenges await me. But, I won't have to do it alone. I received a Craftsman Autohammer under the tree! It's amazing, I was looking for things that I could go and use the new toy on. One stinking nail!

My biggest gripe of the season has to be the number of tie wraps they use when securing a child's toy into place. A little tape and a tie wrap here and there would be fine. But these things are sometimes really tough to unwind, like someone in the factory just thought, "Damn you for having fun, undo this suckers!". We opened a gift and it had (no exaggeration) 6 little black clips on the bottom, with 12 tie wraps to secure a plastic barnyard into a box! Then, a further 2 clips with 6 tie wraps to secure a tractor and trailer. Let's then move onto the stinking horse and cow sat inside the barnyard. They had their own cardboard with their very own tie wraps around their necks, 2 each! I kid you not. 

So, we're sat talking about how to make this quicker and easier next year. It was suggested that you open these up and take the tie wraps out before wrapping them. But, looking at the pile of mangled and torn boxes currently sat waiting to go out to the bin, it's just not feasible. And, even if you were to remove the tie wraps, half of the stuff would fall about. 

There are some toys that have this little black clip tied to them, you twist it and out it pops. Done. Why can't they all just have little black clips? Or sellotape?  Heck, put in non-toxic glue that we can wash off, it would make it easier and quicker than this mess of wires everywhere. 

I've tried to make the markup XHTML compliant, however the component I'm using as an editor (again, a quicker way of dealing with the site basics) [TinyMCE editor] doesn't always create fully compliant XHTML. I'm sure that it's been done and I just need to learn, so, in the meantime bear with me.

I believe that a XHTML compliant site shows a better understanding of HTML in general and makes an overall faster site.

So, here it is the new Hypersonicscream.com

What's changed

The site uses an all new PHP 5 framework that I've been developing on and off (mostly off) for the past 18 months. I had some time on my hands last year so started this work, but until now I haven't had the time to add in the last little bits I needed.

There's nothing here

Well, that's because I'm working on it. I do have registration almost working, but don't want to put it live until I'm happy it's working and isn't going to leave a big dangerous hole in my website. Features to come:

• Registration - All new unfortunately, the database from before is gone!
• Profile - Store basic information on yourself
• Contact form - Probably my biggest immediate priority
• Search - I have a search box and I intend to use it
• Tutorials - Hopefully I'll get the chance to write up some tutorials on what I've done here.

There's also a difference in what I've done here over any other site. I've developed a framework without developing the site. What that means is there is a whole lot of code that's completely generic and not site specific. What I've decided to do is release this framework under the GPLv3 Open Source license to help others develop sites with it (hopefully it's good enough).

Layout

I have changed my direction a little for this site. In the past I've spent many days thinking about the way I want it to look, the way I want to lay it out and I've worked on doing that. This time however, I decided that no design I could make would make the site look the way I truly wanted so I would put the template system in my new framework to the test. I chose a design dcarterdesign mainly because of it's clean yet strong layout. I hope you'll agree.