Wasting Time

Instead of wasting time on my homepage, I recently wasted some time fooling around with Firefox extensions. Up until now the only extension I used on a regular basis was All-in-One Gestures.

But now I've tried ForecastFox and Adblock (both are in the list of popular extensions, and I like what I see. I stumbled upon this list of ads to block which seems to be frequently updated and effective. I started using Flashblock in concert with Adblock.

To top it off I procrastinated further by visiting pointless sites.

The Obsession Fades

At last I'm starting to come to my senses. For a while I was spending almost all of my free time on my site. I created a Wikipedia-like CSS for some of pages, tweaked other CSS files, added links from pages (from my old site that are no longer accessible, and also from my bookmarks), and reorganized a little.

More Redesign

Less PHP, CSS code duplication throughout site. Changed the menu style. No more submenus, and now there are unclickable headings. Found a nice colour scheme generation tool.

I shrunk the validation buttons as I felt they were getting in the way. Forgot to handle the alpha channel the first time around. They now sit humbly in the bottom right hand corner.

I experimented with a pink/purple colour scheme with a horizontal menu for the Bliss pages. Most of my site is back up, though I got rid of some of the old content. The xmmspipe site is the only one left with the original look-and-feel (not counting the old Toshiba pages), though my mathematics notes still look the same as when I first started using CSS.

Major Homepage Renovation

When I first wrote my homepage, I modeled my site on Debian's site which at the time used HTML tables for layout. I had never used CSS and I also felt that plain HTML would give maximum exposure.

A while later, I had to learn CSS when I wrote pages using MathML. The XHTML/CSS approach seemed cleaner and easier, and sometimes when I added new sections to my site I'd use XHTML and CSS. But I never converted the rest of my site out of laziness, and also I was worried that my site would look wrong in IE with its numerous CSS bugs.

I now feel the time is right to use CSS on my whole site [10 reasons why tables should not be used for layout]. I've spent a while trying to learn CSS properly. Additionally I've been reading about webpage design. Apparently, sans-serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts when on screen. The best widely available on-screen sans-serif font is Verdana while for serif fonts it's Georgia[1, 2].

Note I'm still sticking to HTML for now, as XHTML is not handled properly by IE or Google yet.

Now my default CSS file gives my site a kind of bluish Slashdot.org look. My only regret is that w3m will no longer be able to render my page layout (perhaps that's the only advantage of using tables for layout?), but then again, how often do I use text mode browsers?

My site is also long overdue for a general cleanup. So far I've been working on the presentation of my page but the content will also be reorganized.