Change History

• 20^th June My day job means that I have once again been paying far less attention to the website than I would like. I have spent a couple of hours today working on some boring but essential technical stuff (primarily enhanced XHTML 1.1. compliance since you didn't ask :-). I've hopefully not broken anything. Please let me know if I have.
• 14^th March The latest webcam to be added to this site can be found here. It is located at "Moeraki" holiday home at Harrapool by Broadford. The webcam looks out over Broadford Bay to the Crowlin Islands, Applecross peninsula and Loch Kishorn. The feed is courtesty of Jenny Till. Thank-you Jenny.
• 21^st February A year ago I started taking photographs to create a "then and now" feature, comparing some of the scenes shown in the postcard gallery with how the scene appears today. I have finally published the first postcard scene here with many more to follow when I have some more free time.
• 31^st January Another day, another four webcams added to the site! Too many to name but you will find them all on the webcams page. The feeds are once again supplied by Tim Macpherson of Glenelg Holiday Cottages. Thank-you once more Tim.
• 30^th January A couple of enhancements have been carried out to the webcam pages. The webcams page now includes a preview from each of the past five days. Whilst it has always been possible to view any of the past 30 days on the webcam archive pages, including as time-lapse sequences, surprising few people made use of this intriguing feature. By giving this more prominence I hope that this will change.

  On the webcam archive pages I have added a new and useful "play entire day" button along side the pre-existing "play from selected time" button.

  Finally I've made a number of technical changes behind the scenes that has resulted in most of the pages on the site being updated. If you encounter any problems or have any feedback - good, bad or indifferent - please click on the "any comments" link at the bottom of any pages or contact me here.

• 28^th January The third new webcam in little over a month! The view from the new Loch Duich webcam here towards Eilean Donan Castle will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has travelled on the A87 main road to Kyle of Lochalsh. The webcam and feed is courtesy of Tim Macpherson of Glenelg Holiday Cottages. Thank-you Tim.
• 25^th January The second of the two new webcams at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig is up and running here. This webcam looks out across the Sound to Sleat towards the Knoydart peninsula. Once again my thanks to Caoimhín and Dòmhnall.
• 23^rd January The popular time-lapse sequence of a day in the life of Blaven - originally recorded in 2002 - has been replaced by a higher quality time-lapse sequence shot earlier this year. I recorded 24 new sequences over a period of 24 days and all but three days proved unusable. Not for any technical reasons but because the clear blue skies and lack of clouds on 21 of the days do not make for particularly interesting viewing.
• 17^th January Following my annual Christmas pilgrimage to Skye plus lots of unseasonal snow and blue skies, I've added 13 new photographs to the Gallery page. Another four recent images have been added or updated elsewhere on the site. I should come up with a way to identify new images plus some additional content changes that I've made but that will just spoil your fun in spotting them! More to follow.
• 16^th January A RSS feed has been added here. Also note the appearance of the button on the menu bar. Subscribe to this feed using your favourite RSS Reader or Aggregator and you'll automatically receive notification of any significant news or changes to this website. Fred Riley from Nottingham suggested the addition of this useful feature. Thank-you Fred.
• 12^th January The installation of power and network cabling has allowed the first of the two new webcams at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig to be moved to nearer its final home in the roof space of the main college building. Click here to see the new view. The intrusion of the roof is temporary until both webcams are fixed in place. Thanks again to Caoimhín and Dòmhnall.

• 14^th December Those nice people at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig have the first webcam up and running here. The webcam is temporarily located in the college library but will be relocated before the end of February to a more permanent location, without window reflections! My thanks to Caoimhín Donnaíle and Dòmhnall Dòmhnallach for their ongoing efforts.
• 11^th December Some website changes have been made in preparation for two new webcams that I am donating shortly to Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. One of these will replace the failed BBC webcam that has for the past 10 years delivered some stunning images of the Sound of Sleat.
• 12^th September This website is ten years old today. Happy Birthday!
• 28^th June My first free time in over three months. Fortunately the new site has proven to be reliable so I've concentrated today on correcting the embarrassing typos that escaped on to the site. I have also added five new pictures to the gallery, removed references to the defunct Skye Music Festival and Royal Mail Postbus service and added a new section on flying to Skye. Work on the weather page is still outstanding plus there is still much to do on refreshing and updating the content.
• 24^th March The migration and re-write of the webcams archive page and back-end server processing is complete. In response to a couple of requests I've increased the archiving period from five days to thirty days. As a consequence, for the next couple of weeks the oldest days will not contain any images until the archive fills up. Now only the weather page remains outstanding with one weekend to go! During April, with the migration to the new site complete, I'll start on the long overdue task of re-writing and refreshing the words.
• 15^th March First week of the new site! I've spent this weekend clearing tasks on the "to do" list. Only two more pages to finish and they are the most problematic; the webcams archive page and the weather page. Both require a significant amount of work re-writing server side VBscript to C#. Two weekends left in the month, two pages to go.
• 11^th March Added a further nine picture postcards held back until the migration to the new site was (largely) complete. The postcards page has been re-worked to include a gallery of thumbnails eliminated six extra pages.

8^th March www.blaven.com is given an extensive makeover the second time in ten years.

Visually the entire site has been overhauled with a new look, new and re-arranged content and lots of new and updated photographs.

Technically the HTML has been upgraded from XHTML v1.0 to XHTML v1.1 and CSS2. The classic ASP of the previous site is replaced by ASP.net with all server side code re-written in C#.

The rebranding has taken four months working late in to the evening and weekends and is 99% complete. The rough edges will be tidied up before the end of March but if you spot anything obviously wrong please contact me.

• 1^st June In the past couple of months the number of spambot postings via the comments, contact and visitor book forms have risen dramatically with, on any given day, over 100 postings being made. To counteract this the forms on this site now require an additional Captcha-style verification step to determine whether the poster is a real person or a spambot.

• 31^st May Most pages on the site can now be bookmarked on popular social sites including del.ic.ous, digg, google and stumbleupon, using the bookmark button at the end of each page.

• 4^th November Added a fifth page of old picture postcards of Blaven, Torrin and the surrounding area.
• 10^th June Added a new Gallery page containing an assortment of photographs of Blaven, Torrin, Broadford, Skye and beyond.
• 9^th June Revisions to the weather page.
• 2^nd April Multiple revisions to the Skye Links pages ahead of the 2007 holiday season.
• 14^th February Borve webcam closed after six short months of operation. Many thanks to Johnathan Bowker for hosting the webcam during this period.

• 9^th December Corrected the list of John Muir Trust founders on the Torrin page. Sorry.
• 5^th November Added moon phases to the weather page.
• 3^rd November New page added to visitor book.
• 8^th October JavaScript changes to the weather and webcam pages to improve compatibility with the increasingly popular Firefox web browser. Minor content updates and new postcard added. New page added on Kyle Pharmacist and photographer Duncan Macpherson.
• 21^st September Added a couple of new black and white postcards.
• 17^th September Various changes in preparation for the new Borve webcam.
• 14^th May Added a fourth page of postcards plus two new black and white cards.
• 2^nd April Added a short section on the abandoned village of Keppoch. Photograph to follow.
• 1^st April Added a further four black and white postcards plus an additional two colour postcards.
• 18^th March Added four more postcards, splitting the lengthy single page in to three separate pages. Additional updates to the Skye Links page.
• 12^th March Added a new page containing images of old picture postcards of Blaven, Torrin and the surrounding area.
• 5^th March I regularly receive requests from web site visitors asking to be put in touch with individuals who have signed the visitor book. I have added a new facility that allows a message to be sent indirectly to a person in the visitor book by clicking on the e graphic next to their name. To avoid abuse, messages may be reviewed by me before being passed on. The email addresses of individuals in the address book remain private. I have updated the terms and conditions to cover this new facility.
• 19^th February Added a new feature that allows landmarks in any of the main webcam images to optionally be highlighted by overlaid captions. Also added the capability to display additional information on a webcam page.
• 13^th February The comments, contact and visitor book signing forms have been re-written with integral server-side scripts. This is part of the ongoing migration of the site to from PHP on Linux to the Microsoft ASP platform.
• 12^th February Minor change to the main menu, added the new more and site map pages.
• 11^th February More technical changes. Merged three webcam pages in to a single ASP page with client side JavaScript rewritten and moved server side. Also introduced new webcam time bar feature. Minor menu updates and baseline template updates to remove obsolete style sheets.
• 5^th February New "test2" webcam introduced.
• 4^th February Major technical changes during the conversion of the entire website from plain HTML to XHTML compliant ASP derived from a baseline template. This will facilitate the introduction of new and exciting features.
• 1^st February Menu bar changes to all pages, added a drop-down menu.
• 29^th January Added support for Macromedia Flash with the Firefox browser.
• 28^th January Extensive reworking of the webcams page in preparation for the introduction of new webcams. Created sub pages for each webcam that included a new five-day snapshot, archive and playback. Added the "Skye at night" section to the Skye links page.
• 26^th January Created this change history log page.

1^st November www.blaven.com rebranded and re-launched.

• Website change history was not actively maintained during this period.

12^th September www.blaven.com website goes live. The image on the left shows how this site looked on launch day.