Added Some New Features to the Site | Updated Stream Page!

Greetings all! Wow, what a day… when I haven’t been in class I’ve been either working on the site or some aspect of the site or some aspect of the server or what not. Quite a lot of progress has been made.

If you haven’t noticed, then you should check out the stream page. I went about properly building an HTML environment for the stream object to sit in, and I’ve put in some good tips for everyone while they’re watching Chopstick being a lizard. The internet is a really cool place, you know? I was able to find some very clear cut resources (with examples) that helped me to slap that page together in very little time at all. Knowing that some of you are no doubt interested to know what I found helpful, I’ve included them below.

html.am

w3schools.com

I’ve added some new features to the site as well! You might have noticed that I’ve reformatted the home page to not look like such a mess as before, and I’ve added a widget that shows my most recent blog posts for anyone who cares to review what goop I’ve typed up. I used a text widget to embed the LizardCam button in a side bar as well, which looks much nicer than it did before.

I also added an About Me page, and I included a whole bunch of images that — I think — tell my story fairly well. At least, I think that they tell my story better than words ever could. I dunno about you, but when I write about my life it always comes across as some sort of encyclopedic entry, and that tires me out after a while. Pictures really convey a lot more than my words ever could.

Now for a little more geeky server stuff. Today in class I learned about something called NTP, which stands for Network Timing Protocol. It’s basically a way to sync up the system time of all of the machines on a particular network. This was of particular interest to me, since I’m running my LizardCam with two separate machines on a single network (the Desktop runs the camera while the Server runs the stream). My problem previously was that these two machines had different system times, and since I’m running cron jobs to make everything work… yeah.

I didn’t really have a reliable way to sync up the system times until tonight, and I jumped at the chance to install NTP on both my desktop and on the server to ensure that they both have the exact same system time. Then I modified my cron jobs to take that into account. The benefit for all of you? Since I can now trust my timing on my cron jobs better than before, I’ve managed to cut down the stream downtime during cycles by a good minute or so. 😀 Now we’ll just have to wait and see if this works out tomorrow…