amphichon

Okay, after some clumsy wee-hours HTML and PHP hacking, most of the remodeling is done. Some highlights:

• Random images are back! See the pretty link on the sidebar from the home page. These are the same images that used to live in the header, a few revisions ago. They’re about a third of the size now, intentionally so, because I didn’t want them to overwhelm the page, but check out the new functionality – they are now clickable, and your clickity-click will open the random image gallery to that particular page. Note also that about a third of the images have some explanatory text; you may need to switch your view from ‘summary’ to ‘detail’ with the option in the lower right. The scripting seems a bit slow at the moment, probably because it’s kludged together in that magical way that only happens at 4:30am on a Sunday morning, but I’ll try to optimize it a bit in the coming days. (In the meantime if you get bored and want to just cycle quickly through some random images, this link refreshes faster.)
• The image galleries are back! Well to be fair they were never really gone, but the links were. You can get to the Gallery installation from the Images link at the top of the page (or alternatively, by clicking here). There you’ll find the aforementioned random image gallery, as well as a handful of other tasty albums. I’ve got more to put up here but I’m working on an automated process in my new OS, so give me a little while yet on that.
• We’re wearing a new theme. This one is called MistyLook, and it comes to us courtesy of some guy named Sadish at WPThemes.info. I think it’s a much cleaner, lighter look. The header image that came with it was lovely (as you can see at the link above) but I decided to keep my current image, especially since it already fit the misty theme so well. I’ve already tweaked the header, sidebar, and css pretty heavily and will probably continue to do so, but most of the pieces are in place.
• Static pages and links have been updated and cleaned up a bit. Nothing earthshattering but there are minor updates to most all of the static pages. Also the bad links have been weeded out, and Chicago links have finally been replaced with Portland links. More links on the way.
• We’re back in full W3C XHTML and CSS compliance, finally. Well, for all intents and purposes, anyway. We were pretty much there before I did all that hacky stuff to get the random images to work, and I just went back and spent another few minutes catching a few badly closed tags and such, and now it appears that we’re clear in CSS, but there are a couple of Mac-encoded characters floating around that aren’t validating properly in utf-8. I tried switching my Wordpress options to encode in macroman instead, and that gets me through validation, but messes with the formatting plugins I’ve got in place, so tomorrow I’ll have to go through and find those holdouts and knock them back into utf-8. To be fair, though, if you change the options on the validation screen to ‘macroman’ instead of ‘utf-8’, we validate just fine. Moving forward, feel free to keep me honest – validation links for both XHTML and CSS appear in the Bonus Points for Style section at the lower right. (And I’m going to go ahead and jump the gun a bit by putting the “passed!” icons in place, if you don’t mind.)

  Phew. It’s been a hard day’s night. Time for a few hours of sleep before morning. Hope you like the design changes. Any suggestions or comments, or if you run across anything broken or sticking out, please let me know.

  EDIT 4:52pm – Added another link on the random images panel – clicking on the ‘image gallery’ text will now take you to the gallery homepage, while clicking on the image itself will take you into the Random Images album to that specific image.

  EDIT 5:04pm – We’re passing W3C validation testing under utf-8 encoding now. Looks like it was mostly some bad apostrophes, quote marks, and ellipses that I’d pasted in here and there. I went back three pages’ worth of entries to clean up any issues I could find, so most old entries are fine, and the main page with current entries is fine and will remain so going forward. So I figure I’ve done enough to earn myself the happy little standards-compliant icon.

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