Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance.
Jon Franklin
In this modern word of FooBooks and BarSpaces, personal web pages might look like an abandonded technology, but I like them. I encourage everyone to have one.
I am not a web designer, as should be painfully obvious from these pages, nor do I intend to become one. Indeed, I wish most web designers were doing less design and focusing more on helping people deliver accessible content.
Content, in my case, is mostly text, so that's what I'm trying to deliver. I try to follow standards and try to avoid using images purely for decoration or for navigational purposes. The images that I use on the site carry at least some meaning themselves.
Myself, I mostly use Emacs-w3m to
browse the web. I use Emacs-w3m from CVS and the multi-lingualized
www/w3m-m17n FreeBSD port as a backend. I admit that I sometimes
start Firefox even though it feels bad.
There are no Livescr... Javascr... um... ECMAscripts or whatever they are called this week on my pages. Don't get me wrong — I really like interactivity, I just don't think web pages are a good technical choice for interactive use. Consider, for instance, the annoying AJAX breakage and what it does to people with poor eyesight.
I don't do cookies, unless you count the ones baked in an oven.
I use a simple stylesheet only to increase legibility on CSS capable browsers.
A lot of information available on the interwebs is out of date, but even more annoying is that it is so hard to tell if it is out of date or updated yesterday. To remedy this problem at least on my own content I include a timestamp at the bottom of each ordinary HTML file unless it is otherwise dated.
For good and sometimes humourous takes on web design, please see:
Most of the HTML files under my web pages were generated by a modified version of an older version of txt2tags, except the lists under hacks and files which were produced by a trivial Perl script called flist.
An increasingly number of pages are generated by a small Perl script I wrote which I use together with Markdown.pl to generate a small subset of HTML5 from textfiles with minimal markup. The only thing my small script does is to add a header and footer from a template and remove any comments I may have added to the file.
The original source that was used to produce the HTML of most files are available as either foo.t2t (for files intended for txt2tags) or foo.mdu (for Markdown encoded in UTF-8). The source file for this page, for instance, is colophon.mdu.
The news page, the blog and their accompanying RSS and Atom feeds were generated by a slightly hacked Blosxom. I use Blosxom with the Markdown plugin so I don't have to write that icky HTML. As a bonus, it also generates XML validating markup that can be included without quoting in the Atom feed, which I managed to get to generate validating Atom.
The rather minimal CSS stylesheets were written by hand.
The HTML files have been validated with W3C's HTML Validator, the CSS files with the CSS Validator and the RSS and Atom feeds with the W3C Feed Validator. The last time I checked, everything validated correctly. This is important to me, so if you find something strange, please report it to me.
You should probably validate all your own material if you publish anything on the web. If you think about starting to use a new tool or a Content Management System be sure to validate its output before investing time and money on a new tool.
The sitemap was built by Daniel Naber's tree.pl.
Ordinary BSD make from FreBSD was used to
automatically rebuild HTML files if anything had changed. The Makefile
looks something like this (shortened for your reading pleasure):
TARGETS = index.html computers.html
all: $(TARGETS)
.SUFFIXES: .t2t .html .mdu
sitemap.html: $(TARGETS)
tree.pl /home/mc/public_www > $@
.mdu.html:
Markdown.pl $(.IMPSRC) | mdn8 > $@
.t2t.html:
txt2tags -t html --style "default.css" $(.IMPSRC)
clean:
rm $(TARGETS)
sync: $(TARGETS) sitemap.html
rsync -a --delete . hack.org:/home/www/hack.org/mc/
PDF and Postscript files were usually produced with either TeX, using LaTeX macros, or Groff, a free version of troff, usually using my own macros.
Some of the Postscript files were written directly in Postscript by myself, mostly just for the fun of it.
The images may have been manipulated with programs such as ImageMagick, NetPBM, swiggle or xv.
All text was written with GNU Emacs, a Lisp based operating system cunningly disguised as a text editor.
Last updated: <2010-05-28 10:44:56 MEST>