Okay, I admit it, I left the site unchanged for a long while.

Unforgivable.

But, now I've changed the main CSS style, I feel that I can start to develop the site's content. I'm also planning some restructuring work.

I spent this morning fixing up couple of CMS flaws. Firstly, curiously, different versions of MySQL seem to treat the timestamp type in different ways. I was getting the A non well formed numeric value encountered error at the point that my PHP script retrieved the value of such a field, when it was retrieved raw - but only on my local machine. Admittedly, my test platform and release platform should have the same versions, but I'm running Windows locally, not a version of Linux (I know, how could I?).

Anyway, it turns out that the Linux version has timestamp values returned as Unix timestamps, but the Windows version receives the textual representation. Solution? The UNIX_TIMESTAMP() function, a MySQL function which converts a column which would normally give textual representation into a Unix timestamp. Simple enough.

Now I use SELECT *,UNIX_TIMESTAMP(timestamp), so that the timestamp is returned in two ways. Then, test if UNIX_TIMESTAMP(timestamp) is 0. If it is, use the first value of timestamp. Otherwise, use UNIX_TIMESTAMP(timestamp). And then you're left with a normal Unix-style timestamp (seconds since '1970-01-01 00:00:00' UTC).

Anyway, that's fixed for now. Next project: revamp the site structure. The home page will become this blog - that's my first objective.