NEWS, EDITORIALS, REFERENCE
Huge Site Update
It's been two weeks since my last post, but I haven't been sitting on my thumb. For the last month, I've been working on a major overhaul to c64os.com, which you should now see for yourself around this post.
The site began as a simple one-page blog that gave me a place to talk about my development efforts on C64 OS, and to let me explain to the world the things I was learning along the way about 6502 programming and related Commodore technologies. But, I've got a passion for writing, I've known that for most of my adult life. I started to write some lengthy editorial posts here on the blog, including a review of the fanzine FREEZE64, and a review of World of Commodore 2016. I want to continue to write more of these sorts of posts, as well as hardware reviews and recommendations. However, with the simple blog format, posts quickly get pushed down and out of view by newer (and less important) posts.
I've had a longing to build a sort of online catalog of all the C64-related hardware that is commercially available. And I also have two main projects, C64 OS, and C64 Luggable, which really need some technical documentation. And documentation is not the same as a blog post. Blogs are about chronicling a journey, and are best followed and read over time. Or, sometimes a blog post will have some useful technical nuggets that will get picked up and indexed by search engines. To describe the technical details of C64 OS and C64 Luggable I really want a special page, with a table of contents, that describes each of these projects in their gory details.
So, that's what I've done. The changes to the site fix and address all of the above. The site is now divided into 5 main sections, which can be navigated with the main top navigation menu. A welcome page that talks about the rest of the site and gives a bit of history about me, and includes the full hero top section. Then, one page devoted to being the technical documentation, complete with table of contents, for C64 OS. One page devoted to the technical details, overview and construction plans of C64 Luggable. The forth page is the blog. But the blog has been freed from carrying the burden of what the other pages handle. The blog sidebar now has room for an index of past posts, search and feature posts. And the fifth and final page is, I am proud to announce, the Commodore 8-Bit Buyer's Guide.
I've put a huge amount of work into the Buyer's Guide. Finding sources of currently available products, organizing them into categories, finding high quality photos, and editing them to have a consistent size and background (whenever possible.) And assembling them into what I hope you'll agree is an easily navigable, graphically oriented, layout. My plan is for each product, or product family1, to have a feature page built out that provides more photos, and a consistent set of information about its price, how to order it, compatibility and more. Comments are open at the bottom of each feature page, as well as links and photos to similar hardware, or hardware you might want to get to go along with the featured piece.
At the time of this writing, I have only written a feature page for the 1541 Ultimate II+. Please bear with me as it takes a lot of time to build these out. When I began the project I figured there would be 15 to 20 available hardware projects. I was blown away when my list crossed the 100 line and then on up to around 120, give or take depending on availability runs. Now that I know there are so many products, projects and kits available, it makes me even more satisfied that I decided to take on the challenge of cataloging them.
Everything on the site is always a work in progress, but I think it's getting better and more useful as a resource all the time. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them below the article. (Comments are only available if you click the article title from the main blog page to see the article specific page. Or click the blue comments button below the title.)
- I am not planning, for example, to create a separate feature page for both the uIEC/SD and the Deluxe Daughter Card. These products are so clearly meant for each other that both entries in the Buyer's Guide will link to the same feature which discusses them both together. [↩]