Well, I think that's enough page designing for this morning. The results are up at my web site, as the front page and I think they look okay.
The buttons down the right-hand side are probably overkill, but that side was looking a bit bare compared to the left-hand side. They'll probably be replaced by a short list of the most recent entries in here and the other web log style pages.
No doubt it will shuffle about as I reactivate the various bits of my website. The code section needs a good hard look at, as does the who section.
The main aim is to liven things up a bit. People often accuse the site of being deathly dull (which it is). So this journal and the other dynamic bits are an attempt to liven it up by incorporating more of my personality into the site.
With any luck it will work.
Technically, there isn't much to the new design. Bunch of new links in redir.cgi and a couple of new images. Looking at my front page in MSIE, Opera and Mozilla is quite disturbing really. Only Mozilla renders the title graphic correctly. MSIE comes up with a greyish background; Opera just has a white background on it; whereas Mozilla has proper alpha-transparency.
I'll probably take that into account in a later revision, and also for the logo that will go in the [nice logo here] gap left for it.
When the logo comes in, a whole new colour scheme also comes in (it's a logo I designed a while back). I just need to modify the header.shtml file so that all the pages reflect the new design. Which means I need to think about the hierarchical navigation bars (see the tidy pages for an example --- look at the top light purple navigation bar). Hmm. Forgotten the entity for an emdash. Darn it.
It'd be nice if the server had mod_perl, but it's only got PHP and SSI enabled, so I make do with lots of CGI scripts and SSI trickery for such things as navigation and dynamic content. Naturally, I could run HTML::Embperl as part of the CGI scripts. I may do that in time. Ideally, it would have HTML::EmbperlObject enabled and it would all be nice and easy. Ah well. Might ask Jeff about it sometime.
In other news, I'm getting quite attached to the “gestures” in Opera 5.10. Very nice and very productive. They save me having to move the mouse much which can only be a good thing.
Speaking of mice, the mouse I intend to get soon. Select your country and language and you'll be taken to the appropriate page. Logitech Cordless MouseMan Optical. Nice.
Anyway. To bed. Have to carefully review four SRS documents tomorrow/today. So I'll take one of those books I'm reading to bed and read bits of it.
