Website fixes and tweaking

[K2]

The vast majority of the updates I do here have to do with the message board. Sometimes though I get around to tweaking and fixing other parts of the site that don't get as much attention

The main header bar up top that's part of the site banner - the links in that bar had been incorrectly setup for... well for as long as it's been there. Discovered that flaw when I was attempting to convert the site to use an SSL certificate (more on that in a minute). That error is now corrected, and I'm hoping that will resolve the bad behavior I was seeing with HTTPS turned on. Will test that again soon.

Web hosting banner - frankly this shoulda been up and available years ago. You'll now notice a nice little blue mini-banner up on the top right of the site. If you decide to host your own site and you want to use Bluehost, if you click the banner there and setup your hosting account that way, I get a small amount of credit towards my own hosting bill. Technically I setup the affiliate link back in March of 2009 but never used it. About time I guess. I had to make that mini-banner also, all of the pre-made ones they have are HUGE. Bleh.

[K2]

I obtained an SSL certificate a couple days ago so you could use the site here under https - it worked for the most part, but there are a couple parts of the site that wont serve up content securely, and when you view those parts it sometimes causes you to become logged out of the site. Those parts are kinda far and few between but the resulting mess is bad enough, I'm just not gonna go there with it. The only part that would really need to be secured would be during a donation transaction, but when you initiate one it takes you to PayPal's secure site anyways, so that's already covered. Ah well.

[K2]

Got rid of the hit counter. Talk about a hold-over from the 90's It was right at 626,678 hits when I took it down. Over 626k hits in just over 12 years... a lot of websites now get 5-6x that in a month or even a day. Heh.

In its place I put up a tiny lil bit of code that counts up from the day HF was founded, takes care of itself. Right now it displays in years/months/days, but I'd kinda like to play around with it showing total number of days since day one, or even the total number of seconds.

Also updated the Folding@Home block. Nothing you'll notice on the outside, just some code clean-up on the back end.

[K2]

Remember the 'Hardfought Voting Poll' that we used to have on the main page? It's back, runs using AJAX so you can see the results instantly without reloading the entire page. There's even a voting poll archive so when one poll is closed, you can see the results on the archive page. I am still tweaking the look n' feel but it's fully functional.

The first poll is 'Bring the HF Voting Poll Back?' - go vote