Info - Page History Layouts change history

My first homepage in 1995 was an automatically generated homepage in the BBS of The PC Users of Finland (PCUF). It had just my contact information, my favourite links and my picture. It looked simple and dull, but it worked with old browsers, also with the character based Lynx. You can view one screen of my first link page on a Lynx browser.

In April 2001 I made a step forward by learning more about HTML. The 2001 version included a photo gallery, a music page and a computer related page.

In 2004 I started to study JavaScript and PHP. With the help of PHP I first time loaded contents of the sub pages into a common page structure in the fall 2004 version. The colour scheme was changed, but it still varied in the sub pages. My first guestbook was also opened.

In 2005 I started to use PHP more extensively and added an e-card sending page plus some other features, which were not yet integrated in the common page structure: feedback, visitor statistics and counters. Some functions were also made with JavaScript.

At the end of 2005 I made a big layout change. The basic layout idea has been the same since then, although minor changes have been done during the years.

In 2006 and 2007 I added several weather pages (Finland, Europe, Helsinki and World weather) and created my favourite webcam page. A lift-up of my old computer page was also done.

In 2009 I added a location map link to the gallery image pages and also created a separate Google Maps page, which shows all the locations of the photos with small icons with associated info windows.

In 2010 I added a page which shows my photo hikes on Google maps. The track information is taken from the route tracking application of my mobile phone. A "Photo information" link was added to gallery images. It shows most important EXIF tags for those photos which have Exif tags.

In 2011 I changed the menu design to an auto-hide drop-down menu and changed Europe and World weather pages to use Google maps as the map together with automatic positioning of weather stations based on location infirmation included in NWS weather data.

In 2012 I changed the eCard music player to use a the HTML5 native audio player available in all modern browsers.

I finally moved my homepages to a real web host Radicenter in September 2014. The new host provides me good webmaster tools and also decent support, which was missing in the previous host.

In 2015 the main page got a face lift. It now acts as a separate launching page and its background image changes monthly. The design is reponsive.I also added a contact page.

In 2016 the international weather service NOAA/NWS stopped their service of providing decoded airport weather data in text files. That service was replaced by "Aviation Weather Center", where weather data is shown on their web site. Europe and World weather pages were changed to use tne new data. Helsinki and Finland weather pages were changed to use data available from Open Data service of Finnish Meteorological Institute. Data for Helsinki and Finland weather pages are automatically updated in a cron job, while others are updated manually from a button. Also the operation and layout of the current Finland weather page was changed totally.

In 2017 I changed again the menu after having had the auto-hide drop-down menu for 6 years. The menu is now a "hamburger" menu on the top-left of pages. The main reason was to make the menu easier to use with touch screen devices, where the drop-down menu was difficult to use. At the same time I removed the left-side panel from most of the pages, which helps the use especially in mobile phones.
In 2017 & 2018 I modified the page design of Gallery, Links, a few weather pages.

In 2018 I modified pages to be mobile friendly by utilising responsive design where needed.

In 2018-2020: I removed the webcam page and added my webcam links to one category of my links page. I removed also e-cards page totally, because its use had dropped to zero.

In 2021 I added OpenStreetMap implementation as a parallel alternative to some of my map pages. Also a standalone version is now available.

The above list contains only the most important "milestones" of my site changes.

A more comprehensive change history is here.