Webmaker's Notes

Credits

HTML Layout and Design:

Elf Sternberg

Java and Javascript Programming:

Elf Sternberg

Perl CGI Programming:

Elf Sternberg

C++ CGI Programming:

Elf Sternberg

Photography, Home Page:

Tal Greywolf

Digital Photo Editing and Header Artwork:

Elf Sternberg

Content:

Aimee, The Journal Entries, Other tales, and the Home Page:

Elf Sternberg

Your Rights and the Police:

The American Civil Liberties Union

The alt.sex FAQ:

The alt.sex Cabal, 1993

Notes

This restoration of my 1994 - 1997 website took about 20 hours of work, all told. I had to learn a lot about grids, since one of my main reasons for doing this was to master the CSS grid and its various ins and outs.

The changes since 1994 are obvious and everywhere: I'm no longer using transparent gifs to push content around and provide margins and spacing, the Journal Entries clock is now Javascript instead of a Java plug-in, the layout is entirely controlled by CSS and I've had to hide items and reduce margins when looking at it on a phone.

You might notice, if you read the structure of the site in its entirety, that there's a lot of repetition. I rebuilt each section (the home page, alt.sex, your rights, the hanky code) individually, and then merged them back into the project as-is, so there's some duplication. I may make the effort to undo it, but I don't know how much that effort would be worth.

One thing I have learned about this project is that DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) isn't all it's made out to be when working in the web space. I know Django (and by extension Ninja and therefore Tera, the templating engine I use) try hard to make build web pages in a component-oriented fashion, completely DRY, but I find the {{block}} structure erases too much context; I prefer to use scaffolds, layouts, and DAMP: Distinct and Meaningful Parts. Each root template looks like an HTML page, there are just {{ include }} blocks here and there to pull in functionality from the outside world. To me, this felt more comfortable than having a block hanging out in space with a note saying "This replaces the same-named block in the parent object." Building out of parts is what we've been doing since we played with LEGOs, and it felt more natural.

elf.sternberg@gmail.com