Released: April 13, 2006

I've just finished a new version of my personal website. I built it with two purposes in mind. First, it had to work as a marketing vehicle for my consulting services. Second, it had to retain archived content of my old personal blog (since my new personal blog is at http://karlandangela.reeshome.org) and my poetry collection.

With that in mind, I kept the Movable Type back-end and focused on layout and interface changes. I totally rewrote the templates and style-sheets, streamlining the display of information towards my two intended audiences. Gone (I hope) is the overwhelming clutter of my original site. I believe you will find the new site much more aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

Besides design changes, I've also added alternate style sheets for different browsers and environments, as well as a special style sheet for printing. I also had to rename a lot of the files, but thanks to the miracle of htaccess, nobody (not even Google) should notice.

The site is designed primarily to work with IE6+, Firefox 1.0+, Opera 6+, and other browsers of similar modernity (yes, I'm done trying to appease Netscape 4.x). Yes, it also works on IE7 beta (though I had to change from using stylesheet hacks to using conditional stylesheet overlays to get this to work). It looks best in IE thanks to various filters and effects, but it looks pretty much the same on all browsers.

Old Release Notes: May 2003

In May of 2003, I upgraded my personal website to the Movable Type Content Management system (okay, I know it's not technically a CMS, but thanks to a lot of customization on my part, it might as well be). This has made updating my site a lot easier. You can read about my old site here.

Of course, the perfectionist within in me wasn't satisified with the default templates, so I've made a lot of customizations and hacks. These include:

• Almost entirely rewriting the HTML templates so they are more modular.
• Post-processing the generated site with PERL and regular expressions so that I can weed out a few things that aren't xhtml-compliant.
• Redesigning and rewriting the layout (twice, I might add) so that it's based entirely on CSS (try viewing the site on older or text based browsers; it's very readable).
• Generating the site as JSP instead of HTML, which allows me to throw in some JSP code on each page, such as a counter/log file and a browser-determined style sheet.
• Adding a ton of plug-ins, some of which required me to actually hack the Movable Type code (it's PERL-based--it's bringing me back to my roots) before I could get them to work the way I wanted.
• Modifying the newsfeed and front page so that they span all five sections of my site instead of just one section.

So yes, there's a ton of different web technologies working together for this site. Even my photo albums require a different technology--I hacked (basically rewrote) the XML/XSLT output templates for the Dell Image Expert program that came with my computer, which I must say is very well designed (I love the fact that its web output is XML/XSLT based), and I would actually pay money for it if it hadn't come with my computer.

Anyway, in case you haven't figured it out yet, you can get to my website by going to /home/. Enjoy.