NEWS: & UPDATES
Whenever I get chance to make an update or receive new content ideas from readers they get noted here and should be a useful guide to what's new and interesting.
June 2024
Improvements:
- Minor improvements to text and layout corrections on some tables in the Film section
- Improved responsive Image gallery especially for mobile devices
- Very minor fixes to the mobile/small screen formatting
May 2024
Improvements:
- New Magazines section in the Gallery
- I own a lot of Lake magazines but love these digital scans that save wear and tear on my physical copies, most are curtsey of archive.org.
- +3 new Inspiration articles
- New Inspiration article on an episode of Pointless
- Minor updates and improvements to various articles
- Animated Images
- Experimenting with adding animated images to various articles, the motion is visually interesting and enlivens some dry content and helps illustrate some topics.
Stage, TV and Radio tables rejigged for smallers screens
A hecking load of minor fixes to the responsive layout and various wording rephrasing
Several image improvements
More fixes to the mobile/small screen layouts
April 2024
Improvements:
- Visual improvements
- Menu enhancements
- Navigation and titling fixed for new structure
- Small screen menu vastly improved
- Niggles with the Hero and mini banner images corrected
- Films section overhaul
- +7 new Inspiration articles
- More updates and improvements to various articles
- Various minor Biography updates
- About section: New Lake in Wartime page
- Some layout fixes, fact checks and citations added
- Basic Stats page created
- Some how... loads more old type-o's fixed
- Bootstrap fully replaced with W3C styling
Seeing the stats page reveal this site has over 50,000 words was a revelation (and possibly why type-o corrections has been a thing I've dealt with annually).
Finally happy with the responsive main menu and how it works for mobile devices.
March 2024
Improvements:
- Visual improvements
- Menu display improved
- Hero and mini banner image improvements
- Background image positioning and display
- 15+ new Inspiration section articles
- Improved Inspiration layout and menu system
- Many updates and improvements to historical Inspiration articles
- Films section overhaul
- Improved responsive Image gallery layout
- Contact form display improvements
- More CSS and JS clean up from the old version of the site
- SEO improvements
- Ever present type-o's fixed
Better mobile resolution display and simplified responsive layout makes things a bit easier on the eye.
February 2024
Improvements:
- Back with a Bang for 2024!
- Totally new design and overhauled content framework and simplified menu
- Better responsive display on smaller screen sizes
- Major overhaul to Inspiration section
- Improved Gallery layout, but needs work
- Galleries condensed and re-jigged
- Lots of CSS fixes
- Type-o's fixed (even after 20 years.. there's still old, missed corrections)
I'm so pleased to finally have this visual upgrade in place. The design was started back in 2022 when I was finally happy with the content and resurrection of the old material. It has taken until now for me to find the time to properly finalise the ideas (DALL-E was used to inspire some of the imagery) and, once settled on, it was only about a weeks work to recode the HTML and CSS.
Outstanding:
Next steps are to
- Start adding the content I've collected in the last 2 years
- Addressing the minor niggles
- The small screen navigation still requires attention but it is at least functional for now
- Tidy up CSS file and outdated class tags
22 October 2021
Improvements:
- Print: Some Magazine image additions and improvements
- Minor content updates
14 October 2021
Improvements:
- Inspiration: New items added and some old content renovated and updated
- More SEO updates
- Site wide text formatting improved
- Yet another single, ancient type-o corrected
08 October 2021
Mini Maintenance Update...
- Site Map added along with robots and other SEO
- Biography formatting improved
- Broken links from ancient defunct sites fixed
- More fixes to ancient Inspiration section content
- Damn... 2 ancient type-o’s found and corrected
07 October 2021
This last month I’ve been away from home and tied up on so much that I’ve not had time to do much research or find new content, however...
- Major update on The Lost Blonde 2021 in the Inspiration section with word from the creators themselves. Interview with Ian Beaumont of Little Dude Films
- SEO improvements
- Minor fixes to mobile displays
- Minor editorial updates to various articles
- A single type-o spotted.. I’m getting there
15 September 2021
Improvements:
8 September 2021
Improvements:
- About: Hair Style
- Artwork: Jigsaws added
- Transition animations added to galleries, some images and menus (not sure about those yet)
- Gallery: Some Posters and Lobby Cards updated and selected image highlight improved
- Inspiration: Menu added to sub pages and links fixed
- Films: links from Chronology added
- My ever present type-o’s corrected
1 September 2021
Improvements:
- Movies section reworked with reviews integrated, new reviews added, posters replacing lobby cards and lots of format and type-o fixes
- TV: appearances added
- Stage: performances added
- Inspiration: New items added
- SEO work implemented
- Even more minor tweaks and code fixes
Gallery Quality of Life updates:
- Galleries: auto load first image in set, images now take advantage of screen-space without distorting
- Lobby Cards: Young As you Feel, incorrect lobby-card replaced
- Posters: Footsteps poster added
New Sections:
- Lake Spotting expanded to cover all movies noting her first appearance and screenshot
27 August 2021
Improvements:
- Lake Spotting topic added
- TV: Lots of TV appearances added
- Inspiration: New items added, links fixed and type-o’s sorted
- Loads of minor tweaks and code fixes
23 August 2021
Gallery Improvements:
Links Added:
- Radio: Links to audio files
- TV: Links to Videos
20 August 2021
Gallery code overhauled:
- Added image selected highlighting
- Added poor anchoring code.. for now
- Updated the old "And Co" galleries
- Rationalised some of the galleries
Misc.
- Fixed several transparent png files
- Improved texts on several Inspirations with videos and references
- Improved sub 400px display layouts
16 August 2021
New Site launches
July/August 2021
- 2007 backup CD found
- PHP code updated
- New site design created
- HTML framework developed
- Data ported over
- Massive overhaul of the final 2007 data
- Updated About section
- Updated Biography section
- Created Books section
- Filmography section totally renovated
- Gallery section totally renovated
- Artwork section totally renovated
- In print section totally renovated
- Inspiration section totally renovated
- References section totally renovated
- Contact section totally renovated
- Image updates
- Contact form created
- URL purchased
- Iframes replaced
- New inspirations sourced
