So, I got off my duff and finished the redesign I've been working on since August 2004. There's bits that need to be completed still but I think this is what I'm going to go with for awhile.

I played with a couple of different layouts and ended up with this, mostly because HTML is not a layout language, and CSS implementations across browsers is too much of a pain to deal with. I truly detest having to code for specific browser combinations, and I think I managed to come up with a CSS based design that does what I want and degrades workable for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Of course, I think everyone should be using Firefox or Safari, or Opera. Anything but Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I dropped my Personal Journal from the navigation. It's still on the site, but for a variety of reasons I'm not going to highlight it. Partly because I found it to be a pain to maintain two bloggy like sections, and partly because there's too many freaky people online these days for me to continue a personal journal. Maybe I'll set up a mailing list or something.

Other notable bits: all pages use a common PHP which includes a wee bit of logic to handle caching better. There's a common object model for a page (yes, it's true that I can program in object-oriented fashion when I feel like it). There's some stubs in place for using XMLHTTPRequest when I hit my next quantum level for hacking. My goal had been to drop PHP entirely but given that I can handle modified-GET requests with the new code, and everything should (in theory) be compressed, that goal dropped in value. In theory there's some more refactoring I could do in the PHP code but I pushed as much function as possible into one common library (down from 3-4 libraries).

One other thing I've done is switched to using content-negotiation for a variety of files (stylesheet, javascript files, RSS & Atom feeds). I wrote up an article on content negotiation over at my business site: Content Negotiation (aka Multi-Format Processing) for CSS and RSS earlier this month. The benefit is that most browsers & user-agents will request files which are compressed using gzip, dropping my bandwidth utilization. Now, I don't exactly get a lot of traffic, but were I to get slashdott'ed or boingboing'd I'm somewhat better prepared. No guarantees of course, this is still primarily a personal web site and not a mega-corporation site. Yet.

Anyway...either drop me a note or try to use the comments thing here (I turned it back on, will probably get spammed to death again), let me know if this sucks, is so-so, or does-not-suck (to paraphrase a friend). I'm not a designer, I willingly cede that role to others.