Donna's Virtual Realm - Site Updates and History

Curious to know what has been updated recently, or to see how this site has evolved over the years? From this page you can read about recent updates and view previous versions of my site's home page. Note: I do not maintain the previous versions other than archiving the home pages off for this log. Therefore, there is no guarantee the links you find on old versions of my home pages will still work, and in cases where links point to another one of my pages, you will get the most up-to-date version of the linked page, rather than the version that existed at the time. (Who's going to be spending time looking at old, outdated versions of my web site anyway, right? :) ).
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I will fondly remember this as the PicturesOfPlaces.com-inspired update. I have added a feature to let users choose whether to use a popup window or the same window to view full-size pictures when they click on thumbnail images on my site. I also made several changes to reduce the size of my pages including fixes for bugs/oversights that made my pages larger than intended, splitting some of the travel photo pages into multiple smaller pages, and moving a large amount of client-side Javascript code into server-side ASP. Thanks go to PicturesOfPlaces.com for pointing out just how big some of my pages really were. :)

UPDATE 09 July 2006: Added some photos from 2005 to the Arizona page. To keep this page picturesofplaces.com-friendly (i.e., reasonable size), I removed a few of the 2003 pictures to make room for the new ones. The complete 2003 page is available here. I also updated my Favorite Photos page, and added a few of the more recent photos to the rotating images on both my regular home page and Travel Gallery home page. The Guestbook is still broken, btw.

UPDATE 18 June 2006: I still haven't fixed the Guestbook, but I did add some new pictures! Photos from my Memorial Day weekend trip to Palo Duro Canyon have been added to the Texas page. I also added a "recent additions" section to my Travel Gallery home page.

UPDATE 01 May 2006: Was planning to finally do some real updating to this site, but discovered my Contact and Guestbook were broken. I have fixed the Contact page, and will fix the Guestbook sometime this month. Sorry for any inconvenience!

UPDATE 24 April 2005: Added links to my Africa 2004 web log to the sidebar and travel gallery menus. I am far from finished with that page, but since I'm not getting any time to work on it thanks to...well...work, I'm going to go ahead and make what I have so far available for all to see. Hopefully, I can get that page and the Africa part of my site sometime before the end of the next decade!

UPDATE 16 March 2005: Changed the Featured Link. Lack of usage has severely lowered my motivation to keep this page updated. :(

UPDATE 17 December 2004: Changed the Featured Link. (Again, sorry for the delay). I am pointing it to my recent Africa web log for now.

UPDATE 06 September 2004: Changed the Featured Link. So much for making this a monthly occurrence, I guess. I was busy, plus I decided the site I had planned to put there for August was no longer worthy of the honor. :)

UPDATE 24 July 2004: Added two new drawings to the Art Gallery.

UPDATE 03 July 2004: Changed the Featured Link. I'm going to try to make this a monthly occurrence.

UPDATE 07 June 2004: Less than an hour after I finished up the May 30 revision of my site, I received a call that my mom had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. I have added a memorial page for people to who knew her to share their memories, and have updated the Featured Link page to point there.

Change Log:
	Added a cookies-driven feature to let users choose whether they want to view pictures in a popup window, or view them "inline". This was added mainly in response to an e-mail I got from PicturesOfPlace.com stating that popups are not allowed in the sites they link to. Since I get a huge number of visitors to my site from theirs, keeping a listing in their directory was a priority (especially in light of my plans to add a commercial component to this site later on this year :) ). I sent out an e-mail to several friends and family to get their opinion on whether they prefer to see pictures in a popup window or in the same window as the thumbnail. I got divided results, but the majority preferred popups. So, I left popups as the default, however, you can change to "inline" viewing by clicking a link that now appears on all of my travel photo pages as well as the Travel Gallery home page (and the Art Gallery too). Once you change the setting, it stays that way for 30 days, or until you change it again--even if you leave my site and come back. The setting affects my entire site, so if you select "inline" on one of my pages, then that's what you will get for all of them unless you change the setting. (This feature uses cookies to save the information, so your browser settings must allow for this). If you have never been to my site before or have never changed the display method before, the default will be popup windows in response to the majority opinion from my little informal poll. You can override the default display method on the URL, for example: http://www.virtual-realm.com/travel/html/iceland/photos.html?defaultImageDisplayType=inline The above link will send you to my Iceland page with the image display method defaulting to inline, unless you have been to my site before and explicitly chosen popups. (I give deference to the user's previous choice so PicturesOfPlaces.com or other sites can create links to what is in essence a "default-to-no-popups" version of my photo pages without overriding a user's previously-selected setting).
	Fixed a bug on the bottom bar image -- it was pointing to the .png source file, which was 90K as opposed to the < 4K .gif file it was supposed to point to.
	Moved a bunch of code from a client-side Javascript file into a server-side ASP file. This coupled with fixing the bottom bar image immediately took nearly 200K off the size of each of my pages.
	Ran the *Australia* photos through a compression utility. I forgot to do this previously, and as a result, the Australia page was > 1mb! This took around 600K off the size of that page.
	Split the *Arizona* pictures up into two pages of pictures taken in 2003, and those taken between 1997-1999. This put both pages under the PicturesOfPlaces.com requirement of < 300K, and also solved another problem I had with my older photos looking a bit out of place next to the nice new ones I took last year. :) Having done this, I went ahead and re-added the "old" Arizona photos I omitted in Revision 6.0. Basically, the 1997-1999 Arizona page now looks like my Rev 5.x Arizona page did, and my 2003 Arizona page features entirely new photos.
	Split the Asia pictures up into a separate page for each country: *Bali, Singapore, and Malaysia*. The single page was pushing the size limit, if not already over it, and by splitting the pages up, they can now be listed separate under each country.
	Split the Australia photos up into separate pages for *Sydney/New South Wales, The Great Barrier Reef/Cairns in Queensland, and The Northern Territory*.
	Added a last-updated string to the bottombar image.
	Updated the Site Map and FAQ pages with information about the latest changes.

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Major redesign (finally!). Well, it was about time I guess, considering I hadn't done a major update since mid-2000. :) Many of the changes I made are intended to make this site easier to maintain so hopefully I will be more diligent in keeping it up to date in the future. Among many other things, I completely changed the look of the site, got rid of frames, added several new photos and travel pages, updated the Art Gallery, and added various new pages around the site. Incidentally, the "curved-panorama-around-the-top" look was an idea I had for a web site I developed for a friend's business. He had a better idea for his own site, so I used it for mine. :)

Change Log:
	Completely changed the look and feel of the site.
	Moved everything into Dreamweaver templates. Hopefully, this will make the site easier to maintain and motivate me to update more often.
	Got rid of frames. Most people get to my site via a link to one of the travel photo pages. With frames, they never see the rest of the site. Now the menus will be on every page.
	Got rid of the all the title/header images. I'll use actual text from now own (more of that making it easier to maintain stuff :) ).
	Re-formatted the Recent Updates and Site History page (this page). Added the hide/show change log feature. (It doesn't work on Netscape 4x in case you were wondering, but at least for recent browsers there won't be such an overly-large amount of text on this page when it first loads).
	Added random photos to my main page and Travel Gallery home page.
	Added popup-window functionality for viewing images. Now when you click on a thumbnail image on my site (*Travel Gallery, Art Gallery*, etc.) the image and commentary are displayed in a popup-window. This is easier to maintain, and works best now that my site is no longer in frames.
	Added new drawings to the Art Gallery.
	Re-wrote, edited, or updated the text on various pages around the site.
	Moved the Who Am I page underneath a new Info menu item along with newly-added Frequently Asked Questions, Contact Me, and Site Map pages..
	Removed the Photo Album page for now. I'll add it back later once I figure out a good place to put it.
	Re-wrote the Guest Book. The old one was going to be a real pain in the neck to work into my new template-based design, so I just wrote a new one.
	Added a Contact Me link. Use this to send questions, comments, or other feedback about my site.
	Got rid of all the dead links on the Other Sites page. I also added some (mostly under a Local News and Information section).
	Changed the Featured Link slightly. I'm keeping my brother-in-law's link up for a little while longer since his music has moved from the now-defunct mp3.com to his music site at www.WillWillis.us.
Travel Gallery Changes:
	Added a *Nevada* page with pictures from 2003.
	Added several more pictures to the *Arizona* page. I also dropped a few (mostly those that I replaced with better versions from my 2003 trip).
	Made the *Australia photos page* an official part of the site, including an About my Trip page.
	Added the country's flag and a random photo to the About My Trip page for each country.
	Changed/added photos to the My Favorite Photos page.
	Added an introduction and some on-page photos to my 2003 travel journal about Sedona, Arizona. Made this page an official part of the site under Digital Sedona.

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Change Log:

Update: 14 October 2003

Added a few more pencil designs to the art gallery (actually, this was done a while ago, I just forgot to mention it here. :) )
Changed main page photo.

Update: 07 April 2002

Revamped art gallery. Added several new pencil designs.
Changed Featured Link.
Photos from Australia are in the travel gallery. These were actually added some time ago, but I forgot to update the revisions page and have long since forgotten the date I added them. Currently, there's no commentary, and the link on the Travel Gallery page is rather temporary-looking. I plan to rectify both of these deficiencies in the next major update of this site (later this year, or so goes best-laid-plans at least).
Changed main page photo.

Update: 03 September 2000

First take at the Art Gallery. I'll add more later.

Original Revision Notes:

Major redesign--it was time. This site is now 800X600 friendly as much as possible, the text is much easier to read, and it should load faster with fewer and smaller graphics. I have also reduced the size of the travel photos, and added the long-awaited commentary. In case there's someone out there who prefers the larger 1024X768 images (even though the newer ones are much higher quality), I have preserved the previous version (Revision 4.3) of this site in its entirety, and it may be accessed by clicking here. Note: This new site is still somewhat under construction. However, even in its unfinished state, I still think it is much nicer than the previous site, so I am going to break with my "perfectionist" temperament this time and make the new site available before every last detail is complete. I expect to have the remaining travel photos labeled, the art gallery completed, and the sidebar buttons added to the travel gallery during the coming months. In the meantime, enjoy what has been completed so far. As always, suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Acknowledgements:

Will Willis for "beta testing" this revision and making several useful suggestions on wording and design.
Suman Chepuri for suggestions on software to make the photos as small as possible and still retain the quality.
Melissa Willis for finding a rather amusing typo.
Magnus Sigurdsson for correcting my translation of "Mývatn".

Change Log:

Made numerous design enhancements, including:
- Removed all background images to make the text easier to read.
- Standardized all text and link colors to black/blue/purple.
- Got rid of the title bar frame. Two frames are enough!
- Colorized sidebars.
- Changed font face to Helvetica/Arial on all pages.
- Made all links to other sites open in a new browser window. Also did the same for previous revisions, and pages that open "outside" the frame.
- Made many pages on my site that once opened in a full window open in the frame instead. This should make it easier to navigate around.
- Created graphics for most titles and headings in place of dull, boring H1, H2, etc. Past users may notice the title and heading graphics were filled with images that should look familiar.
- Consolidated Star Trek Sites, Family, What's Happening at the South Pole, and Other Miscellaneous Links down into one page called Links to Other Sites.
- Reformatted dates on main and Revisions pages to international standard.
- Moved link to Revisions page over to the sidebar and called it What's New?.
- Removed comment about "Complaints, compliments, suggestions, and bugs", as well as all Address lines at the bottom of individual pages, in favor of a brief note in the sidebars identifying me and my e-mail address. This, in conjunction with the above change to move the Revisions link to the sidebar lets 800X600 viewers see the entire main page in their browser window without needing to scroll.
Completely reorganized and redesigned the Travel Gallery:
- Rescanned all photos to take advantage of the improved quality produced by the scanner I now use. I also made the photos smaller this time to be 800X600 friendly and to decrease download time. The old Travel Photo Gallery site, complete with the 1024X768 images, background images, and even a link back to the previous revision of my web site can be found here. A few of the photos from the previous site were omitted because I either couldn't find the original prints, thought they were redundant, or both. However, I also have added a lot of new photos too, which should more than make up for the half dozen or so that were not carried over.
- The long-awaited commentary has arrived! The entire "mission" of this site has now changed. Instead of just being a photo gallery, each country or state contains information about the country/state, details of my trip(s) there, links to other sites about the country/state, in addition to the newly-scanned, smaller photos. Rather than having a single page of photos, each country/state will now have a frame page with navigational sidebar.
- Added additional pictures of Iceland (in part to make up for some of the previous ones that I can no longer find).
- Added additional pictures of Arizona from my 1999 trip to Sedona.
- Added additional pictures of Texas from my 1999 trip to Big Bend.
- Added a link to the Revisions page. Previously this was only found at www.virtual-realm.com.
- Added My Favorite Photos page.
Updated the information on the Who Am I? page.
Took the "new" off of the Guest Book link (15+ months is quite enough).
Changed Donna's Travel Photo Gallery link to just Travel Gallery.
Removed What's the Story Behind Those Background Images? link.
Corrected several misspellings and changed some wording on the Revisions page.
Added new page called Featured Link. Unlike (ahem!) certain other family members, I will not attempt a Link of the Week or Link of the Month. The Featured Link page will be updated periodically, probably twice a year or so.

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Couple of minor changes.

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Bug fixes and other minor changes mostly to travel pages.

Change Log:

Renamed travel page to Donna's Travel Photo Gallery.
For anyone who cares, the actual URL to the Photo Gallery is: http://www.virtual-realm.com/donna/travel/index.html and not http://www.virtual-realm.com/donna/travel/html/index.html as previously reported.
Thanks go to Rick Stromberg of Waymark.Net for finding a bug on the Travel Gallery main page--clicking on the miniature Austin photo will now bring up a larger version of that picture, and not a picture from the Grand Canyon. Thanks Rick! :)
Added Copyright logo and a message on how to bring up the full-size pictures on all travel photo pages.
Made images on Travel Photo Gallery main page open in full window.
Fixed bug on this page--Revision 4.1 was pointing to 4.0.

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Minor bug fixes, and reorganized a few things.

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Name change, major overhaul, and move to new site. I have done my best to catch links that still point to dfw.net, but please email me if you find some I missed.

Change Log:

Changed name from "Donna's Domain" to "Donna's Virtual Realm". This is the LAST TIME I am changing the name of this site! This time, I did a very thorough search for other sites with the same name, and came up empty--if someone else opens one in the future, well, there will just have to be two of us... :)
Moved from DFWnet to new site with lots of available disk space. The new address, "www.virtual-realm.com", is my own registered domain name, so as long I don't fall on hard times, the address to this site shouldn't be changing again anytime soon. :)
Changed e-mail address on all pages to point to my new address.
Some changes, courtesy of Microsoft Frontpage:
- New frame format for main page and several others.
- Spiced up background images by use of Microsoft Image Composer.
Changed picture on main page--the old one was from 1994.
Made "Travel" section into a separate page.
Added the long-awaited pictures from Singpore/Bali/Malaysia and Nebraska/South Dakota/Wyoming/Montana.
New, improved South Pole page.
Updated out-dated links on the Star Trek links page.
Added new page for family members.
Updated Background images page.

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The Arizona pictures are here!

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Where are all you new visitors coming from? :)

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The Austin pictures are finally here!

Change Log:

Created Austin pictures page, complete with new, smaller background.
Updated backgrounds page accordingly. :)
Restored missing Sweden, England, and DC pictures. Hopefully they'll stay around this time!
Removed notice about DFWnet data loss--I've "punished" them enough for this I think. :)
Added notice about Sweden, England, and DC picture loss/restoration. *Sigh*
Added copyright information to pictures pages. (Maybe I'm just feeling paranoid tonight?)
Added "What's going on at the South Pole" section.
Fixed "Miscellaneous items" bug on main page.
Fixed background page link back to Revisions page (it still pointed to the old name "updates.html")
Changed default background color to black so my pages will be more readable when the text loads before the background image. Thanks go to Mike Comberiate for making this observation.

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My page is now back online with a few minor changes following massive data loss at dfw.net.

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Washington DC pictures are finally here! (Some of them, anyway).

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Some minor "enhancements". (And yes, to anyone who was wondering, the Washington DC pictures really ARE coming soon). :)

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"Emergency" bug-fixes. :)

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Added background images, Sweden pictures, and site history page.

Change Log:

Added background images. For anyone who is curious: To find out how these background images were created, click here to learn the secret. :)
More changes to colors to accommodate new background images.
Added Revision section. Added the page you're now reading. :)
Increased font size on "Who am I" link to introduction. Much easier to see now.
Color/font changes and addition of background image to Introduction page.
Added "And now a...." line to top of Introduction page.
Travel section:
- Changed list to reverse-chronological order rather than chronological order. That way, most recent trips will be on top.
- Added link to Sweden pictures.
- Color changes to Iceland Pictures and England pictures to acommodate new background images. Also increased font sizes and centered the thumbnail images.

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Work-in-progress revision--I was this far along with work on Revision 3.0, and since I liked this better than 2.0, I went ahead and put it out there. :)

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"Clean-up" revision in preparation for major overhaul.

Change Log:

Changed page title from "Donna's Homepage" to "Donna's Domain".
Re-scanned JPEG image donna1.jpg. New image is much higher quality than the old one was.
Updated personal introduction and moved it to a page of its own. Added donna2.jpg to the introduction page.
Removed "dead" link to GIFserv Archives. After this long, I give up on ever finding anyone to host my Jurassic Park/Stargate pictures. :(
Removed link to Matchmaker Modem. I'll make a separate link page for sites such as this later on down the line.
Added Travel section. Added Iceland pictures to Travel section. Created "placeholders" for Sweden/England and Washington DC, as I haven't scanned in these pictures yet.
Photo Album: Changed wording on stormie.gif from "My pet Cockatiel..." to "My ex"--that bird has been with his new family over a year now.
Star Trek Sites: Removed "dead" links to sites that no longer exist. Removed "illegal" pictures of DS9 and TNG--Paramount says we aren't to have these sorts of things out there anymore. Also removed solicitation for other such items.
Removed Movie Web Pages section. The only two movie sites links I had were from 1994. This section might come back later if I come across any really cool movie web sites in the future.
Other miscellaneous links: Removed link to Nameless Mud (I give up on that mud ever coming back up). Removed link to DFWLUG Homepage as it appears to be "dead".

Here is what my page looked like prior to 09 February 1997:

Donna's Homepage