You see a new website: for the technically-minded and others who may be interested, here's what happened over the last two months.

The old Askari website was built around a series of static HTML pages and a link to a popular open source ecommerce program called "oscommerce."  Over time the static pages became just too hard to maintain, so I added another popular open source program called Mambo to manage the content.  Mambo had arrived at a fork and wasn't being developed further, so in 2007 I switched to Joomla.  That was the "Resources" pages.

This fall it became necessary to more to a new server.  I took that opportunity to re-organize the site a bit.  First, I completely did away with the static pages.  Only the home page was still useful--all the links pointed to Joomla pages already.  Instead, Joomla became the home page and I reorganized it a bit, migrating all the content from the existing database.  The ecommerce site is still oscommerce, although I modified the look of that a bit, too.  You can still get to it from a tabat the top of the home page or directly by its URL.  I renamed it "webstore" which is certainly more descriptive than the default "oscommerce."  If you have the old web store home page bookmarked, I have provided a forwarding link.

All the information from the old store site was migrated.  New version of MySQL which caused some data issues: those who used European character sets in  their names or addresses may find special accent marks were lost in translation.  Apparently, unicode isn't always unicode.  The new server also has PHP5 instead of PHP4, so the old oscommerce base had to be updated as well.  That meant validating or updating about a dozen add-ons (like the fix for selecting your state or province).   Lots and lots and lots of work.

The end result may not look all that different but under the hood it is much improved.  For example--although it doesn't help existing accounts--I found a complete "province" list for every country in the world.  Now after picking a country the provinces for that country are displayed in a drop-down menu.  Also, the way the new program works, you are protected by a secure connection any time you enter personal data--for example, creating your account--instead of just when you check out.  I've added a couple more security features which, for the sake of security, I won't mention here.

Overall I hope you like the changes and am always interested to have feedback about the site.  Now, back to making miniatures!