OK, maybe calling it a wed site is a step too far - we already have this ‘dlog’, after all.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the progress I’m making on the main zoolyweds web site, which should be finished by the time you read this, since we’re not planning to tell anyone about this dlog until everything’s ready, hopefully by the end of the month. I have so far prepared the home page, the guest list page, the guest info page, the login and ‘view site as someone else’ systems and all the panels that appear down the sides of the pages, so there’s still plenty more to do, but Edith’s been writing text for the ‘where to stay’ page and I’ve got a full day today to get stuck in to working on the site.

For those of you who are interested in such things, the zoolyweds site is written in PHP 5 with a database back-end. (If this means nothing to you, skip this paragraph and the next one :) ) The database, I’m afraid, is only a Microsoft Access job, connecting via ODBC, because we’re actually hosting the zoolyweds site here in our living room, running Apache 2 on Windows 2000 (which I may or may not risk upgrading to XP before the site goes live). This means we can quickly and easily edit and add to the database as needed, but on the down side it also means the site is a little on the slow side and at the mercy of our ADSL connection (although as far as I’m aware that hasn’t caused any downtime in the two weeks I’ve been developing, so that’s good.) Oh, I knew there had to be another plus side - it also means it can be properly hosted at the www.zoolyweds.co.uk domain, rather than just redirected there (like this dlog.zoolyweds.co.uk subdomain).

We are going to pay out a small amount of money to have the web redirection service for dlog.zoolyweds.co.uk hosted outside our living room, so regardless of the whims of our in-house hosting you’ll always be able to get to this dlog via this address. If you find the main site unavailable for any surprising length of time, I suggest checking this dlog for info.

Anyway, enough technical stuff - if any non-technically minded person is still reading this, I recommend a quick visit to the far less jargon-ridden zoolyweds Help page for info and assistance with using that site, and hopefully you’ll find that it’s all rather less complicated than I may have made it sound in my geek-propelled excitement.

I hope everyone enjoys using these web sites in the run-up to the wedding, and finds them a useful resource for keeping in touch with what’s going on and making arrangements for the day. I’m sure we’re not the first people to have a wedding web site but I’d like to think that ours is breaking new ground in some way… even if it’s just in terms of taste in colour schemes :)