Welcome to howden.net.nz

What is howden.net.nz?
howden.net.nz is simply the personal website of Blair Howden, nothing more, nothing less. Originally this site was constructed in 1998 as part of web design project when I was student and I decided to keep the site running afterwards adding extra content and eventually giving the site it's own domain howden.net.nz in 2001.

Who am I?
My name is Blair Howden, you are probably thinking why would you go to the trouble of creating your own site like these days anyone can have a presense on the web by joining a social networking site such as Facebook or Google+ but this site was constructed long before such pages existed. For a time I contemplated whether it was worth keeping this site going but remembering the diary I kept about my battle with cancer in 2005 I felt this justified having a website. So this is now the new and much smaller howden.net.nz with a new and more efficient design and minus some of the less interesting content.

Site News

Saturday 14 January 2012
The opening page now has a much smaller and cleaner look.

Sunday 20 March 2011
Updates have been made to support Internet Explorer 9, a newer version of Lightbox is now in use which supports IE9. Lightbox is the app used to display images in a gallery in certain parts of this website. The sites renders fine under IE9 but I am not liking the forced ClearType fonts this site looks best with ClearType turned off. Personally will not be using this browser at this point in time. Will stick with IE8 or Firefox.

Wednesday 5 January 2011
Website has now received major updates to content and also the introduction of the Lightbox Image Gallery for viewing most images on the website. Lightbox does have some issues with Internet Explorer 9, as IE9 is still in beta I recommend you view this website with an alternative browser until this issue is fixed.

Sunday 21 March 2010
The page now has a Site Map at the bottom and the My Computers page is now back online.

Saturday 9 January 2010
The redesign of this website is now almost complete and now online for all to view. The coding for the previous site was quite dated so I have fixed most of this also this site now uses PHP and mySQL. The new site has a slightly improved look and some previously dropped content has been put back.

Tuesday 22 December 2009
howden.net.nz is currently going through a revamp. After building a site for Southern Pride Lions earlier this year I learnt a lot more about web design mainly using more advanced PHP and also CSS as a result I decided it was time to give this site a bit of a polish up behind the scenes and also an improved design.

Thursday 23 July 2009
howden.net.nz has now moved to a new server, my own server which sits in the corner of my lounge. This is the second time howden.net.nz has been hosted inside my house back in 2003 the site was hosted my flatmates Linux box. howden.net.nz now runs on my server which runs Windows Server 2003 and uses IIS with PHP and MySQL added in.

Thursday 16 April 2009
The "About Mataura Island" page is now online this page is about the community I grew up in. Photos have now been updated to include more recent photos.

Friday 2 January 2009
After being offline for nearly 3 months howden.net.nz is now back online. I have spent some time over the past few weeks rebuilding what is a much more simple site and with a slight change in the content on the page. Computer related pages have now been dumped in favour of stuff that hopefully readers will actually be interested in reading.