Were you directed here from Google or simply passing by to check out an old article you read previously only to find that it isn’t here anymore? Don’t worry you’re not imagining things, they were here and are gone now. Here is why:

Al my sites (12 in total) was hosted by a local hosting company who was basically reselling American hosting at affordable prices. That hosting solution went well for longer than 2 years, but then the server got hacked. This is also a pretty normal thing to happen. I’ve seen it before and I’m sure I will see it again.

The problem came in when the American hosting company didn’t do backups like they were supposed to and to make a long story short lost 3 months of my data across all my sites.

I moved my sites over to Media Temple and so far it’s running really well, the service is great and they have ridiculous amounts of help files in their online knowledge base.

I also didn’t have any backups of the missing posts, so I guess they are gone. The good news is that I’m not planning to stop writing on the blog, so I’m sure that those articles will soon be a distant memory, dwarfed by the awesome new articles on blog.codeninja.co.za

OK, so I’m in the process of recoding the Win This! website. This time around I did everything on the site, The design, the HTML/CSS/JavaScript and I’m now busy doing the PHP integration from the back-end I built for the initial launch.

So here are some teaser images for what you can expect from the new site:

Check back soon to see the final product.

ScientificFeed.com is some sort of a landmark project for me. Its the 1st time that I did a whole site start to end where PHP was involved. (I’m currently still learning PHP and this was my 1st learning project) I came up with the idea, then designed the site, then coded the front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) and then coded all of the PHP for it.

The idea was simple. I would build a widget that people can put it on their site or blog and reach their visitors with fresh facts on every visit… while educating them in a fun way about science.

The facts are split into 6 categories (animals, plants, technology, space, medical and the human body). This is to make sure that you don’t force your visitors to read about tape worms on you astronomy site. The single view of a fact will also show you 3 related facts from the same category, for further browsing.

The site is sporting a custom back end that allows me to add/remove facts, track widget usage and check messages that was sent from the site’s contact form.

Check out the ScientificFeed site! (and maybe sign up for a widget too!)

I like to think of it as a sunrise on a summer morning.. a new design!

There are still one or two things I want to “fix” and change, but for the most part, this is it!

I am not a designer so this took a while to do and I cant even begin to start to say thanks to my buddies (defaulterror, phreek and mocoloco) who helped by making sure I stayed on track.

Just to give some idea on some of the more technical stuff.. scripting is now powered by jQuery and so will the new modal boxes be once I implement them. I also upgraded the WordPress and the blog is now running on the awesome new WordPress 2.7. I also made sure that the pages validate under XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Well that is pretty much all I have to say about the new design..

Hope to see you here again soon!

OK, so it’s no secret that Gmail is probably the best online email provider out there.. I use it every day and so does millions and millions of other people..

As I signed in this morning to go check my mail I notices that the normal layout looked slightly different.. and after inspecting my settings I found a new “Themes” tab.

I wouldn’t normally mention something like this… but the fact that they have a ninja theme simply made my day.. check the attached screen shot… this is AWESOME!!!!!