Welcome to the new and updated site. Both this blog and the parent andrewatkinson.net site have been rewritten from the ground up. Previously, the site was constructed in a truly inarticulate form of HTML, which was littered with worthless tags, incorrect tags and just plain old gibberish. It has now been written to be closer to W3C standards compliance, and is heavily dependant on CSS 2(ish).

I am, it must be said, one of the growing league of fans of CSS (cascading styles sheets) for applying design rules to pages, and sort-of separating logical structure and content from appearance. Of course, it doesn't actually work, but hobbles along all the same. I find that a reasurringly human aspect of it. So between the HTML, CSS and the colour-blind mutt that is JavaScript the majority of the site is now finished. (A few glitches persist, especially in the blog, but hopefully I will root them out.)

Most of the JavaScript is used to create an external script for the left and right columns which permits me to update just that JS file and effect site wide changes. So, when a new series of work presents itself, I can update the script and the whole site will include that new work. Or so goes the plan. Plus several other scripts allow me to include my del.icio.us feed and a flickr stream for added content. Again these should be kept current automatically.

The last two ideas were stolen from my good friend andrew eason and his website. It was he who first showed me that the CSS could govern the appearance of his blog after we had discussed it in the abstract. So, I guess that is the third idea I've stolen from him. Its ok, he's got big pockets and it caused him no pain.

One last note. Don't use IE5.x for mac with this site. IE5 for mac's css dialect is somewhat strange, and this site (nor others that I've created) don't agree with it. However, as MS aren't going to be creating another IE for mac, and as most users switch to safari or firefox this will be a diminishing problem. BTW I get about 30% of my traffic from firefox now, so I think that they probably are getting close to their 10% market share globally. An amazing feat considering the situation 1 year ago.