About this Site

I truly enjoyed the process of creating this new look, particularly the satisfaction of getting the bells and whistles of the autobiography page to function. Here I've compiled a brief list of the different technologies and functions that are leveraged by the site.

Link Fader from KaosWeaver.com
These functions are used to fade the background and text colors of the links in the bar at the top of each page. I modified them slightly to account for quick mouse movements on and off the link areas, though it's still not perfect.

Section Scrolling from Panic, Inc's Coda Site
I saw Panic's beautiful presentation of their Coda software (which I sometimes use), and I knew I wanted it on my site. Though the javscript files aren't meant to be publicly available, websites are inherently open source, and I kept all their copyright notices at the top of their files.

fleXcroll Vertical Scrolling by Hesido
Used to vertically scroll the content within the autobiography sections so that the page itself doesn't need to be as tall. Like all the others listed above, it degrades gracefully on non-javascript browsers.

Lightbox2 by Lokesh Dhakar
Special thanks to Daniel Edwins for showing me this. Used as a schnazzy image gallery on the web design page to showcase my previous work. Takes advantage of the Scriptaculous and Prototype frameworks.

PHP-based Email Obfuscation based on code from planet-source-code.com
Used to write all mailto: commands and other email addresses as a series of symbols rather than plain text, which helps prevent most spam-bots from harvesting them but maintains the browser and human-readability. I've included a plain text version of this function online for others to use.

Variable Stylesheets based on Time of Day
The color scheme you see on this site changes depending on what time of day it is in Minnesota (when my ISP upgrades to PHP5 I'll be able to localize that using the date_sunrise and date_sunset functions, but for now, "day" is 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM Central).

As one final note, I should say this site is best enjoyed using Safari 3, Firefox 2, or Internet Explorer 7. Most things should still work in previous versions, it just won't look as pretty.