News

New U. Texas Website Nearly Complete!

Posted by Paul Macklin

22 July 2007 at 10:43 PM PDT (UTC +?)

I've spent some spare time here and there over the past couple of weeks updating my website. I'm shooting for a neat and clean look as much as possible, with a University of Texas color scheme. I'm also trying to automate maintenance as much as possible. To that end, my menus are now specified as an XML file that's parsed by some PHP code. This means that if I want to change the menu layout, I only have to change one file, rather than every file. As usual, all CSS, HTML, PHP, and RSS is hand-crafted in a simple text editor and is w3c standards-compliant :-). I'm also working on improving my CSS for non-screen media, particularly for clean, black & white printing.

I'm also experimenting with new technology. I spent a few days learning how to create compliant RSS 2.0 news feeds. Anybody who's interested can now subscribe to a publications feed or a research news feed. These feeds are also automated: some PHP code parses the same XML files that I use to store data for my news and publications pages.

Aside from my multimedia page, the new infrastructure for the site is now nearly in place. After that, I'll be ready to finalize the menu and site layout, as well as fill in content. I may also add a brief news summary on the main index page, as I did on old webpage. It's been fun to start nearly from scratch on web design to incorporate new technology along with a clean, modern look.