It was only 18 months ago when I decided it was finally time to abandon our up-to-then static news pages (something that were an utter nightmare to modify and keep up-to-date), and went through the laborious task of converting years of news and hundreds of articles stored in hard-coded HTML files into a friendlier database format. Unfortunately the end result, while marginally more convenient for me to use, was still far from ideal. The software I had written tended to follow the same static principles employed by regular HTML pages, and didn’t take advantage of any of the capabilities that a database could offer.

Well, over the past few weeks I’ve been attempting to rectify that situation by writing brand new software for our news database from scratch (yes, Remote Central uses almost exclusively custom software written by myself – and not off-the-shelf packages).

The end result is what you see here. All previous news articles have been expanded to include items formerly missing such as titles, captions, author name, the actual time of posting and tagging categories. Also new is the ability for our members to add their own comments (if you’re logged in to your Remote Central account the comment box will automatically show up lower down on this page), a “related articles” section, a list of the most popular headlines, plus an RSS news feed for those who use them.

To go along with this software I’ve also come up with a fresh, clean new look, and have so far applied the same style to our home page. Be sure to let me know what you think, as well as if you spot any problems or glitches.