Hello world!
30 Oct 2004, 8:52am
If you haven’t been able to tell, this site just went through a major overhaul. A lot of things may still not work. There may be be typos. It will take about a month or so for this to all shake out. I started this site in 1999 so that I could practice building and maintaining a web site. Back then I was just interested in learning how to build a site: basic HTML, basic Javascript and so on. I sat in my office at Adobe where I was an intern at the time and built a sort of reasonable site in my spare time. If you go to webarchive.org you can dig up some of the old designs (I should probably provide a direct link?).
Recently I’ve overhauled my site so that I can learn more about XHTML and CSS, then I made the jump and moved over to Movable Type. Part of that required me to move away from Yahoo Website Services and over to a company that supports Movable Type, PHP and so on. After digging around I decided to go with Jumpline.com on recommendation from Andrei and Donna.
I was told by Andrei that they guys are Jumpline would install Movable Type for me, but when I contacted tech support they informed me that this wasn’t the case. So I spent a Saturday doing the installation on my own. I have a cheapo account that doesn’t allow for SSH so I had to set everything up through FTP. This made mucking with MySQL a pain, so I ended up using Berkeley DB.
Because this site started before I had Movable Type running, the overall style is not as similar to other websites that started out as blogs to begin with. At a functional level, a lot of my pages are static. On an aesthetic level, the stylesheet for the site very simple. I was shocked at the complexity of the Movable Type template stylesheet.
My design aesthetic has always been about doing more with less. That makes me a stodgy modernist to some, but it’s just my taste so that’s that. I can appreciate the work of the Italian Memphis movement, but it’s just not for me. I love the aesthetic of the Wall Street Journal. The density. The feeling of sophistication. If I can get anywhere near that successful design with a website I will be happy. Unfortunately the success of the WSJ isn’t reflected in the web version, so I’ve been forced to go about figuring out the translation on my own.
