Introducing another redesign

The day the previous design went live I began to regret moving the blog content directly to the home page. I had for good reason kept it relegated to its own section in all of my previous designs, but I convinced myself to go against my intuition for the sake of a more frequently updated home page. I should have crunched through one more revision before I released it, because I found that having the full-blown contents of a blog on the home page made it nearly impossible to present any other section of content with equal emphasis without making a jumbled mess of a side panel. In all of my other designs, I had insisted that the blog was only a part of what constituted a personal website, which is what I consider kellegous.com to be. This new design, or better, this drastic revision of the previous design returns to that philosophy and still manages to make the home page more dynamic. In fact, the home page now serves primarily to present summaries of what is found inside each of the sections of content, the blog representing only one of those three sections. Like a few other redesigns that have shown up in the past few months, this one owes more to the organization of traditional print publications that to that of the typical blog.

Please heed the usual redesign warning, you may encounter pages that did not transition so well into the new design. I am already aware of several that I hope to patch up in the next couple of days. If you do come across anything wonky, please do drop me an email so I can add it to my list. With this design, I am also planning on phasing out some of the really old content on the site (like some of the stuff that came directly from my Georgia Tech personal page) so also let me know if something suddenly coughs up a unexpected 404. There is very little useful information in some of my old stuff and revamping the hideous markup is just more than I will be able to tackle in the near future.

Also, I am going to try to hold myself to what I write this time and follow through with a few articles about the internals of the new design. I found what I think are novel solutions to a couple of issues that nagged me in previous designs so maybe someone out there is experiencing the same issues and can benefit from a brief description of what I have done here. Look for articles on the following little tricks:

• using XSLT with Moveable Type to produce site content and feeds from MT entries and other XML data sources.
• using PHP to deliver non standard CSS to IE6 only so that it can properly render alpha channels in PNG's.
• using PHP and client side scripting to update comment counts on a static pages.
• using PHP to ensure that reader comments conform to XHTML Strict.

A couple of them are super simple and fairly obvious, but I've seen more obvious and simple explained in great detail before so I will make no assumptions on how useful it will be and just write it.