This holiday I’ve finally had time to recraft my web presence. Wot! It’s been a really long time coming.

The process of making the layout was truly horrendous. I built the whole thing from a concept that I grew to despise and eventually scrapped everything but the logical containment. I tore down images and graphics I’d spent a good few hours on each and replaced them with… well less. And now I’m happy. It very concisely does it’s job.

Writing the content to actually populate the thing took almost as long. I rather dislike writing about myself. Of course there will never be another person reading it with the same detail I did, so perhaps it unnecessary to worry about. Whatever. We are of course our own harshest critics.

I still have to add some images to the work page that I can’t access/generate without actually being on a Brown CS computer. The things will only ever let one account have access to the GPU at once  and I’ve yet to have the privilege when logged in over SSH – so I can’t run and screenshot my CS123 final. It can wait.

In addition to designing and building the layout, I’ve returned to my programming roots and had a chance to do some PHP work, whipping up a simple blog engine to run a Gruber style commentary thing on. It should let me keep my personal stuff on this blog and not have to resort to using posterous or another service for me to write about tech stuff around me. The engine let’s you post, edit, and delete and works with a MySQL db. Aside from that it has perma-links, pagination and an rss feed. That’s it. Oh and so far editing is done in raw HTML, but I might make it use markdown. As I said, simple. -But fun for a few hours of work – and the first time I’ve rally looked at PHP since coming to Brown.