Want to Write For Accessify?

After a year out, I’ve finally got back to the process of re-coding and re-designing Accessify. Some may know that although this site is powered with ASP (a Microsoft-only technology), I am now firmly a Mac user. This, and the travels, made updates to anything other than the home page a major hassle (apologies go out at this point to anyone who took the time to point out bugs they spotted that have not been fixed. Now you know why!). So, I re-built the majority of the site in PHP and MySQL, and also got help from a number of individuals in re-coding some of the tools and wizards (they will be given the appropriate credit once the site is re-launched), but having reached the 90% progress mark, I stopped work and downed tools. Why? Well, it was just crazy to consider re-launching a site when I was on the other side of the world with infrequent Internet access. So I parked the work and vowed to pick it up again when I could.

Visiting Austin for SXSW 2005 both inspired me and made me realise that I need to pick up those proverbial tools again, and that’s exactly what has happened. In the process of dusting down the old content in the last few days it’s become apparent that the site needs more content (other than the fairly frequent news updates). And this is the reason for this post: If you are interested in accessibility and would like to write a feature, opinion piece (rant about whatever you like) or put together a tutorial, please drop me a line. I’m not asking for article submissions at this time - I’d rather wait until the site has a firm re-launch date - just for people to register interest so that I can get back to them at the appropriate time.

Other Things I Need to Do

• Find some decent hosting, must support PHP/MySQL and allow use of .htaccess files. Can you recommend anyone? If you can, please drop me a line with an indication of cost
• Find a way of turning a few hundred pages of ASP URLs into PHP equivalents. I’ve re-built the whole site and it’s not a simple case of re-writing the file extension using mod_rewrite. Basically, I’m wondering if there’s a way of entering into a database all my ‘before’ and ‘after’ URLs and then converting them all to mod_rewrite statements. If you know how I might do this, please drop me a line.
• I’m also trying to think about what might be useful to add to the tools and wizards section of the site. Do you have any ideas about tools you’d like to see (note - I am aware that many people have asked for a List-O-Matic that supports two-level lists for use with drop-downs, before you suggest!)

So, with that I’ll get back to some proper, ‘paid’ work!