Tuesday 31 March 2009

Spring update

It's been a while since I last updated this blog but that doesn't mean Bob the Alien's Tour of the Solar System has been getting neglected. Towards the end of last year, I began to update the look of the website. Turned out that this was a more time-consuming exercise than I first thought but I've finally got the entire site looking new and fresh. If you see any old-style pages anywhere, let me know and I'll get them sorted.

There have been a couple of new additions to the site. In the astronomy section, there is a section about Famous Astronomers. Every month, a new profile of an astronomer will be added to the site. The page launched (or relaunched - it's actually been half-complete on the site for about a year!) in March 2009 with a profile of Nicholas Copernicus, the astronomer often credited with being the founder of modern astronomy since he provided that best evidence that the Sun, and not Earth, is at the centre of the Solar System.

Also added to the site is a page called Journeys to Jupiter. This page describes the missions that have taken place to the Solar System's largest planet. A similar page about the Voyager mission is currently in development and should be completed shortly. The Space Exploration section, which includes the Voyager mission page, is this section that is the least complete and, in the parts that are complete, out of date. Nothing appears in the Living in Space section, and the page about future space missions hasn't been updated since the site was launched in 2000. It currently shows "future" missions as being between 2001 and 2005!

Other minor changes are more questions and answers added to the Ask an Alien! section, a section that has been mostly ignored since being added but is set to be greatly expanded. The main menu page has a slightly new logo (as does this blog) and the page about the Hubble Space Telescope has moved from the Space Exploration section to the Astronomy section.

Now that the cosmetic update to the website is complete, it gives me more time to concentrate on the content. As well as completing the pages that have links on the site but no content and also adding more content to Ask an Alien!, the Space A-Z is also going to be improved and then, I'll be going through each of the other pages and updating the content of all of them! Looks like Bob the Alien is going to have a busy spring!