The Cobbler's Children: Now with Shoes!

I'm sure that all three of my regular readers will notice the long-in-coming change now visible at eikimartinson.com. Most of my friends are probably sick of telling me what they think of innumerable design mock-ups, so I just went ahead and implemented one of my ideas, and I'm actually happy with the results. It's not too fancy, but I think it'll get the job done.

All the pages are valid XHTML and CSS, or they should be; if there are any exceptions to that, I'm interested to hear about them. That contact page, by the way, is a new feature; I've implemented a mailer form and script for purposes of spam protection. The site is composed according to the vertical rhythm concept (click the check box in the footer to see for yourself) with a new addition of my own—a bit of javascript to maintain the rhythm across images of any possible height.

The blog side of the site, which is what you're reading now, has always been powered by the Serendipity (abbreviated "s9y") blog engine. I implemented the new look as a s9y template with a bit of Smarty hacking, and both the blog and the static HTML pages (try the about, engineering, and artworks menu items) make use of the same CSS stylesheet. I created a new Archives plugin (which is actually only slightly modified from the s9y-included one) so that the list of months would be output as an unordered list in HTML rather than as a number of links separated by BR's. According to the creator of Serendipity, this change is coming anyway for version 1.4, at which time I'll just stop using my own plugin. The categories plugin produces the same kind of output thanks to the use of a smarty template for it. I also wrote a plugin to handle the "featured project" link you see on the upper-right of blog pages.

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