New Site, v3.0!

Aloha All!

I hope you're enjoying the redesign of my academic web site.

New features include:

• Fluid layout for optimal viewing on any size screen. (Try it! Resize your browser window and the layout should flip around.)
• This blog's posts are incorporated via RSS and PHP and no longer in a messy iframe.
• New page featuring meeting times and presentation topics for the Game Theory Reading Group.

This version is based on the excellent templates provided by YAMB (Yet Another Mobile Boilerplate). Their code was indispensable in teaching me about fluid design and allowing the whole update process to take a little under two weeks of evenings of work.

I'm also very please to be able to bring you these blog entries in a much more native and natural environment than in the previous version. Many thanks to the good people at SimplePie (also on GitHub) for an excellent PHP class that pulls the RSS feed from Blogger and lets me display it the way I want it. As they say, they really do put the "simple back in Really Simple Syndication." Their product is well-documented, and they offer copious use examples. I felt it was a great introduction to PHP programming.

One final shout-out goes to Martin Monperrus for his handy bibtexbrowser PHP script. This tool is what I'm using to generate and display the list of papers we are considering presenting to the Game Theory Reading Group.

One final announcement is that the page itself has moved (sub)domains! The site formerly found on www2.hawaii.edu is now living on ee.hawaii.edu. The move was necessitated by the current version's extensive use of PHP (which the University of Hawaii domain does not support, but the Electrical Engineering subdomain does). So, apologies to all you book-markers out there, but I've put a 301 redirect on the old site, so you should be able to find your way over here.

Enjoy, and please let me know if you have any feedback.

Stay 200 OK,

Clay

New Site, v2.0!

That's right, after about a one month hiatus, my website for all things academic is back in action. I really would appreciate any comments and criticism you have about it. I am an utter n00b at most of this.

Wondering what motivated the revamp? To be honest, I was quite happy with the old version that I built with iWeb. It turns out that iWeb was not as happy with it. After adding a blog entry in the native iWeb interface, the application crashed and would continue to do so after any further modifications to the blog pages. Since I don't really foresee this type of website changing very often (aside from the blog section), it didn't make much sense to me to continue along that path.

I made the effort of actually taking my computer in to an Apple store to see if their employees (I find it pretentious to refer to them as geniuses) could offer any suggestions. The technical support rep was congenial and sympathetic to my plight, but in the end, entirely unhelpful in resolving issues with a corrupted iWeb site.

At this time, I sought the advice of the foremost computer guru I know: Ben, one of my best friends for over 10 years now. His advice on which GUI-based website builder to use: None. Every site he's written has come from the vast white wasteland of a plain text editor (he recommended gedit, by the way). I can't really blame him; nothing teaches you how something works like building it from the ground up.

So, I pulled all of the site's files down from the University of Hawaii server and set out to write my second website (the first being the v0.0 of this same website, but its layout was worthy of Geocities, and I don't really like to talk about it).

In this process, I've become much more familiar with HTML elements (and the fact that there are only about 20 or so relevant tags), cascading style sheets (CSS) to format the content, and browser versus server functionality. None of these would have come out of simply recopying the iWeb site. Throughout the process, the website HTML Dog proved an invaluable resource for me to constantly look up (and re-look up) the proper terminology for the effect I wanted to create.

As of today, the site is up and fully operational. Features I am particularly fond of are the Post-it "contact" info, and the embedding of this blog in the "News" page. If you'd like, go ahead and unsubscribe from the old blog's feed and add this one. Also, yay for comments.

Stay < marked up />
Clay

New Site!

Originally posted Friday, February 19, 2010

Welcome to my newly redesigned website!

After some minor---but persistent---ridicule, the old pure-html-written-in-notepad site gets retired today. To replace it, I’ve drawn up my first site using iWeb 3.0. Given that my previous site building experience was solely text-based, I have to say that this is a step up. However, I am not naive enough to think that this is the end-all of site builders.

Actually this is primarily a test to see whether iWeb could handle a larger task (more on that later). In the end, I don’t think this will be my go-to application to build complicated customized websites. However, it should be just fine for keeping this site up and running.

I would love to get your feedback on the redesign, but I can only enable comments if I host the site through MobileMe (lame). In the end, you’ll have to either be mute or reach me on Facebook or the like.

Cheers

-Clay