Log of changes to Coises’ web site

The first goal of this redesign was to be mobile-friendly. Almost everything should work well on smartphones, tablets and desktop and laptop computers. Two of the browser games—Expectation and Spaghetti—don’t yet work well on phone-sized screens, though they should work fine on tablets.

Most pages have buttons near the lower right to set the text size smaller or larger.

Backgrounds for many pages are from Transparent Textures.

I’ve tried to minimize broken URLs. Most bookmarks and links from outside the site will either still be at the same place or will be handled with a redirect. A few things—mostly photographs—didn’t make it to the new site in any form; most photographs that remain are now stored with significantly higher resolution.

About

This section—where you are now—used to be the “Home” section. “Who (is Coises?)” became About Coises, “What (is here?)” became Site map, “When (did it change?)” became this Change log and “Where (else?)” became Elsewhere. All pretty obvious. “Why (not?)” never had much in it, but the idea is now rolled into the Unbound section.

Music

I redesigned the Music section. Songs are grouped and sequenced instead of being in one long chronological list. Song pages have lyrics, audio and video players as appropriate (no Flash). Previous and next song buttons are near the top left, download buttons and (for videos) a button to switch between the video player and the lyrics and audio player are near the top right. Lyrics are formatted to display without scrolling whenever possible.

I removed four unrecorded songs I didn’t like very much (Fifteen Minutes of Fame, Late, Lovin’ Hand and Why?).

I also removed the two songs which were collaborations (Julie, Julie, Julie and Whirlwind). I’m no longer in touch with either writer; but since both of them have web presences, and neither mentions the song we wrote together, I’m guessing they are not happy with them. Unless I am asked to remove them, the pages and my attempts to record them will remain accessible; but I’ve taken them out of the Music section, so they’re no longer linked from anywhere except this change log entry.

Photos

I reorganized the Photos section into a number of separate galleries. Each gallery shows several photographs at a reasonable size. You can navigate between galleries with the arrow buttons at the left and right sides of the gallery title.

You can click or tap any photo in the galleries to enlarge it, and you can navigate left and right between the enlarged images. I implemented these and other desktop- and mobile-friendly features using Dmitry Semenov’s PhotoSwipe JavaScript package.

Most of the full-size photographs shown after you click or tap a photo in one of the galleries have significantly higher resolution than their counterparts on the previous version of this site.

Software

I separated the browser games from the Windows games, and I added thumbnails for all the games to the Software index page.

I removed three programs (Launcher, MonitorSleep and VOBDNorm) which are very outdated and probably aren’t used by anyone.

I also removed Poker Squared, a browser game which no one liked, including me.

Unbound

The Unbound section expands on what used to be in the “Writings” section.

I added The Story of the Ten Commandments (as told by Coises), A Thin Place in the Skin of Things and Dream Dawning to the “Stories and Poetry” (formerly “Fiction”) section.

I added There Is No Political Solution to the “Essays and letters” section.

I added The Old and the Young, a series of four comics originally posed to LiveJournal in 2006, and Postmodern News, a (hopefully) continuing series of humorous graphics, to the new “Graphic tales” section.

1 April 2016

Replaced Slicker version 2.0 in Coises’ Software with Coises’ Slicker version 2.1, which adds a compact version of the game and features higher resolution graphics which adapt to any window size and orientation.

13 March 2016

Updated Quintzee in Coises’ Software to version 2.0.

12 March 2016

Replaced Slicker version 1.0.1 in Coises’ Software with version 2.0. Version 1 was written in Java using Java Web Start for deployment, which no longer works for unsigned code unless the user jumps through some hoops. Version 2 presents the same game, with the same look and feel, using HTML and Javascript.

Updated US-1252 in Coises’ Software to version 1.1.

Removed SwiftKey from Coises’ Software. (This program has nothing to do with the Android keyboard by the same name. I just happened to name my program “SwiftKey” back in 2006; the first public beta of the now well-known SwiftKey appeared in 2010.) If you really want it, you can still find the installer at ftp://ftp.coises.com/swiftkey-1.0.2-10.exe and the C++ source archive at ftp://ftp.coises.com/swiftkey-1.0.2-10-source.zip. I don’t recommend it, though. If you need a keyboard macro program for Windows, I recommend AutoHotkey. In fact, I always did recommend that program for ordinary users; SwiftKey was written for a specific circumstance, and wasn’t designed to be a good tool for general use. As its specific circumstance is long gone, and its name belongs to a far more popular and sophisticated product, I am sending it to its appropriate eternal rest.

28 September 2014

Updated Coises’ Spaghetti

Updated the growl word lists for more complete coverage of words from Scrabble dictionaries; this affects Expectation, Hunt & Peck and Spaghetti.

Changed links to Expectation in Coises’ Software to open normally (rather than in a new window), matching the links for Hunt & Peck and Spaghetti.

25 August 2014

Added Coises’ Spaghetti to Coises’ Software.

14 August 2014

Added Coises’ Hunt & Peck to Coises’ Software.

13 July 2014

Added Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet to Coises’ Writings.

17 April 2014

Updated Coises’ Expectation in Coises’ Software to version 2.0.1. This minor update made two changes:

The Play button, after changing to Done during a game, now reverts to Play (instead of New Game) after a game is finished.
Some help text was rewritten.

3 April 2014

Updated Coises’ Expectation in Coises’ Software to version 2.

1 December 2013

Added Aftershock to Coises’ Songs.

18 November 2013

Removed a photo at subject's request.

10 November 2013

Added Flying Lessons to Coises’ Songs.

11 September 2013

Added Watch the video on YouTube link to Miss Me for a While in Coises’ Songs.

21 August 2013

Added Give Peace a Second Chance to Home : Why Not?

Updated several links at Home : Where else? : Blogs.

15 July 2013

Added Vipanatra to Coises’ Software.

20 January 2013

Added Inauguration Day to Home : Why Not?

11 April 2012

Added Long, Low Dog to Coises’ Songs.

19 February 2012

Added another picture of Buddy to Coises’ Photos: Animal Friends.

Added information about Buddy to Home : Who is Coises? : Animal Companions.

9 February 2012

Added pictures of Buddy and Joe to Coises’ Photos: Animal Friends.

23 January 2012

Added Julie, Julie, Julie to Coises’ Songs.

10 January 2012

Changed all pages in Coises’ Songs that used the Windows Media Player plugin to use the standalone version of the WordPress Audio Player instead. The WMP plugin did not work for some people, for no reason I was ever able to discover; hopefully this Flash-based player will be closer to universal.

Added Facebook meta-tags and a Share button to pages for recorded songs in Coises’ Songs. The tags still don’t set the artist, and sometimes the title, correctly, though.

7 January 2012

Added Flood Plain to Coises’ Songs.

31 December 2011

Replaced Old Man Rock with a new remix.

25 December 2011

Added A Friend Request to Coises’ Songs.

19 December 2011

Added Pretty Mary to Coises’ Songs.

17 November 2011

Uploaded corrected mix of Make Me a River. This only matters if you downloaded a copy of the mp3 before 2:10 pm EST / 11:10 am PST Novermber 17th, 2011.

16 November 2011

Added Make Me a River to Coises’ Songs.

9 August 2011

Added a picture of DJ and I having dinner at Roy’s in Las Vegas to Coises’ Photos: Through the Years.

6 August 2011

Added Coises’ Expectation to Coises’ Software.

24 July 2011

Added Wishes and Fishes to Coises’ Songs.

29 June 2011

Added Whirlwind to Coises’ Songs.

26 June 2011

Added Carry the Weight of Love to Coises’ Songs.

17 June 2011

Added a picture from high school at the top of Coises’ Photos: Through the Years.

16 June 2011

Added The Kind Side to Coises’ Songs.

11 June 2011

This was a complete web site redesign. These are the major changes:

Cosmetics and Organization

All pages have a common logo/heading, so navigation should be a bit more consistent. A new design which scrolls the content while leaving the header and footer in place (on most systems), similar to that previously used for song pages in the Music section, was applied to most parts of the site except the Photos section.

Home : Where else? contains interesting offsite links that were accessed by the links at the lower right side of the home page in the previous design (and prior to that were called “Favorite Links”).

Home : Why not? was added to serve as a repository for whatever strikes my fancy that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

The audio players on the song pages in the Music section were moved to the new logo/heading area, so they no longer scroll off the screen when scrolling the lyrics. “Autoplay” is now disabled, so the music no longer starts playing when you go to a recorded song page until you choose to start it by clicking the play button in the player.

The “orphan” pages with pictures of our homes in Costa Rica were moved to Photos : Homes in Costa Rica (2, 3, 4).

Content

Home : Who is Coises? (formerly The FAQs about Coises) has been brought up to date and re-organized. It no longer adheres to the rec.music.tori-amos introductory “pFAQ” (personal FAQ) format; more biographical narrative has been added, while various sections (such as “Turnons” and “Quotes”) that were part of the pFAQ format have been removed.

A site map was added at Home : What is here?.

Various additions, deletions and corrections were incorporated into the new Home : Where else? page.

“Coises’ Covers” were removed from the Music section, which now consists entirely of my own compositions.

The song page for Rising Up to Shut You Down now contains an embedded YouTube video player instead of an audio player.

Several photos were added to Photos : Through the Years and Photos : Animal Friends.

In Software, licensing for Poker Squared was changed to the Expat/MIT license; Launcher, MonitorSleep and US-1252 were explicitly placed in the public domain. What a Drag (a skin for the now obsolete Windows Media Player 9) was removed.

In Writings, the links to my LiveJournal and to Déjà Coises (a Google Groups search for my Usenet posts) were removed. The LiveJournal link can still be found in Where else? : Coises.

29 May 2011

Added Love in 4/4 Time to Coises’ Songs.

27 May 2011

Added Mourning Comes the Dawn to Coises’ Songs.

7 May 2011

Added recording of We’re Number One.

5 May 2011

Added Chicken Little Blues and We’re Number One to Coises’ Songs.

24 April 2011

Added Watch the video on YouTube link to Rising Up to Shut You Down, and replaced the audio file with a slightly different version incorporating minor changes as used in the video.

20 April 2011

Added Rising Up to Shut You Down to Coises’ Songs.

4 October 2010

Added Lightning in Your Hand to Coises’ Songs. Changed licensing for all original songs to Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

20 September 2010

Added Come Away, Linda to Coises’ Songs.

13 September 2010

Added Miss Me for a While to Coises’ Songs.

8 September 2010

Added Old Man Rock to Coises’ Songs.

3 September 2010

Added Cinema to Coises’ Songs.

30 August 2010

Added sheet music for Just Bring Me Home.

25 August 2010

Added Just Bring Me Home to Coises’ Songs.

28 July 2010

Added mp3 for Sunday Clown.

15 July 2010

Added mp3 for Meet Me in the Sunset and made some changes to the lyrics and the sheet music.

12 July 2010

Added sheet music for Meet Me in the Sunset.

11 July 2010

Added Meet Me in the Sunset to Coises’ Songs.

9 July 2010

Added Sunday Clown to Coises’ Songs.

27 June 2010

Added Cat’s Claw to Coises Writes.

13 June 2010

Added Sing Me a Song about Old Chicago to Coises’ Songs.

15 July 2009

Added the keyboard layout US-1252 to the “Other” section of Coises’ Software.

13 July 2009

Added Amazon.com reviews to the Writings section of the home page, corrected link to review of Aquarius Revisited and removed the broken link to review of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (which can be found among the Amazon.com reviews).

Removed sub-sections under the Kindred Spirits link in the Writings section of the home page.

Removed Coises’ Wish List from the stuff section of the home page.

25 April 2009

Added mp3 of Heartbeat to Coises’ Songs.

16 April 2009

Added mp3 of Don’t Get Your Hopes Up to Coises’ Songs.

11 April 2009

Added Searchlight to Coises’ Songs.

2 April 2009

Added Fabius Maximus to the blogs section of the home page.

17 March 2009

Added Democracy, Ends and Means to the Writings section of the home page.

31 January 2009

Added Coises’ Quintzee to the Games section of Coises’ Software.

4 January 2009

Added Poker Squared to the Games section of Coises’ Software.

13 December 2008

Added The Digital Cuttlefish to the Blogs section of the home page.

Added pictures of me with the family with which I stayed in Heredia in the summer of 2008, and a picture of Borgia, my landlady’s Maltese, to the photographs pages.

Updated The FAQs about Coises.

30 October 2008

Added The Big Picture to the Blogs section of the home page.

Updated SwiftKey to version 1.0.2, which provides a work-around for some users for whom SwiftKey omits some or all of the text it is supposed to type.

28 October 2008

Updated code for “All Music Guide” searches in the “music” section of the home page... we’ll see how long it keeps working this time.

Updated code for “Reviews” and “Mr. Cranky” searches in the “movies” section of the home page.

27 October 2008

Added Don’t Get Your Hopes Up, Heartbeat and Debbie’s Tune to Coises’ Songs.

24 September 2008

Changed display of blogs in home page to use the Google AJAX Feed API instead of Feed to JavaScript, which has become very slow to update in the past month or two.

Minor updates to some home page sections.

16 December 2007

Updated Slicker to version 1.0.1, which fixes a minor display error.

10 October 2007

Fixed (hopefully) the All Music Guide searches on the music panel.

29 September 2007

Added Slicker to Coises’ Software, and re-arranged the software index a bit to place games, applications and other software in separate sections.

28 August 2007

I changed the entire structure of the site. What used to be “Favorite Links” has been radically reworked and is now part of my home page (see the options at the lower right). The FAQs About Coises was updated and VOBDNorm was added to Software.

I’m doing my best to be sure this site works in Internet Explorer 6 and up and in current versions of Opera and Firefox on Windows. I have no way of testing it on other platforms and browsers, so for those I can only hope...