Main Points

Here's our log of testing, development, and maintenance since we launched EC 2.0 in January of 2009. We have content page demos for what each phase of the website looked like and descriptions of the changes we made to templates and site architecture. We've also posted our testing procedures so you can follow our workflow in detail and see how we've tried to streamline our procedures to make it easy to start new tests, easy to conduct and review new development, easy to freeze test pages and record the history of our development efforts, and easy to push new changes to the live webpages. All techniques to make website maintenance and administration as systematic and simple as possible.

Content Page Demos

These demos describe the changes we've made in our website since the launch of EC 2.0, a current history of website development. We are considering as a next major step moving much more of the content into a database and developing some more sophisticated ASP.NET custom controls to access them. We'll see how development goes and where it takes us. We got here by launching a new template based site architecture using ASP.NET master pages as chronicled in our Master Page Development section. Where we go from here is at your fingertips and mouse clicks.

  • ContentDemoTesting.aspx - This page displays what we've written about our latest changes - assuming we're that together... good luck. ;)
  1. ContentDemo20090125.aspx - This is our first object oriented template based on ASP.NET master pages. It defined the launch of Earth Chronicle 2.0, and required us to spend the next several months redoing all the pages in the master page based templates. The benefits however are extreme, for one thing it only took us several months to rebuild the entire website in our spare time, probably an increase in development speed of x5. And the speed of future changes will be magnified just as greatly.
  2. ContentDemo20090504.aspx - This template includes the modified navbar with the expanded clickable area and highlight. This UI enchancement was a key addition, and some additional minor changes were taking place in the background.
  3. ContentDemo20091027.aspx - Completing the redesign and development on Earth Chronicle, meant having to implement those changes. This meant taking the theorhetical master page template and "really" driving two websites from it. It also meant upgrading the CSS to take advantage of our new object oriented CSS (OO-CSS) principles that we'd bench tested in the design demo. Here are the Beta website revisions that grew out of that process.

Earth Chronicle Content Demos

Earth Chronicle was the original website that we put together, not that we got very far with it. Soon our need for superior development drove the Beta website to become the tail that wagged the dog. If you're interested in Earth Chronicle's earliest history, check out the site's black and green origins. However, it was with the development of the master page templates that we began to work seriously on the core of Earth Chronicle, the Public Domain Library, beginning in 2009/09/26. So without further ado, here's the modern development of Earth Chronicle.

  1. Earth Chronicle Content Demo 2009/10/27 - This is the first Earth Chronicle Design we implemented after launching EC 2.0.
  2. EC Home Demo 2009/10/27 - Earth Chronicle is the first site which has custom pages, naturally the first one is our home page. Check out version one.
  3. Roman Forum Demo 2009/10/27 - Our Roman Forum also required a custom design; here's the first version.

Testing Procedures

If you're interested in the life cycle of our testing pages from initiation through implementation you can review our current testing procedures. Probably more than you ever wanted to know, but we take you step by step through our development methodology not least to get feedback on improvements that we can make. Before these procedures were set up, website administration was more or less informal, mistakes were sometimes made repeatedly, but the website was small enough to be manageable. Now that we've grown, having a formal written procedure puts it all down in electrons so our website maintenance practices can be much more rigorously debugged and streamlined.

  1. Testing Procedures 2009/01/25 - These were the first testing procedures that we formalized for site administration following the release of the new master page templates.
  2. Testing Procedures 2009/09/20 - Testing procedures version 2.

Website Programming (Application Classes)

Most of the other pieces of the website's structure are about UI development. That's really been our expertise to this point, however, we're now developing some in house programming capabilities and need a place to chronicle our development as a dynamic web application.

  • Application Development Index - Our development section for system design and polished production grade code that has been launched for Earth Chronicle.

Planning and Architecture

Earth Chronicle goes through extensive planning and implementation. Website planning (not to be confused with website design) and architecture are higher level topics that are also critical to the success of a project. If you'd like to learn more about our architecture and high level design, click here.

Historical Development

Interested in the history of Earth Chronicle? Want to see/laugh at our early attempts at web design? Wander through the first generation website as it was originally coded in HTML. Everyone makes mistakes and here are a lot of ours conveniently collected for your entertainment... ahem. I mean education. Check out Earth Chronicle's history.