I’ve been under the weather the last several days and have been trying to take it easy. So I have taken the opportunity to do a little web searching.

I have been looking for a good open source HTML / PHP editor that runs on Windows for a while. I like Bluefish, but it does not run on Windows without Cygwin. I know that I should just set up a Linux partition and work from there, but I have found it too hard to go back and forth. And almost all the key software tools I use (The Sky, NexRemote, MaximDL, FocusMax, etc.) run only on the Windows platform. So I want a Windows or, ideally, a multi-platform tool. I believe I have found it in Eclipse.

I heard about Eclipse at work, where our Java developers would like to move to it as the preferred IDE platform. Eclipse is an open-source platform for building IDEs (integrated development environments) and has been primarily focused on Java®. They do have an IDE for PHP and the tool also understands HTML. I downloaded and installed it and it has been very easy to use. The HTTP context help isn’t great, but it is good enough so far. Finding the tool got me inspired to clean up the site.

All of the main pages (not the blog, gallery, or wiki) of the site have been updated to load the sidebar from an external file. The top bar is still static, as I would have to write some PHP to get that to load more flexibly, but that is on the table. Each page now also shows when it was last updated. I also have, with the help of the validator in Eclipse, made sure all the pages are XHTML compliant. I made major updates to the Equipment page, adding links to the products and putting software into categories.

I also updated the banner in the Astrophoto Gallery. The default color for the title text was too dark, so that is lighter. I also replaced the delivered background image from the theme with a bit of Mare Nectaris. It’s a bit more personalized now.

Perhaps now I’ll personalize the wiki. Or perhaps clean up Schlei.com