Well, School has been in high gear lately and it's been forever since we've had an update. But, I've been working on quite a bunch of new features and this has been a pretty major upgrade. As you can see, changed the look and feel quite a bit. Hopefully it's a little easier on the eyes now. I think I like the leaves in the background but if anybody has a better suggestion I'd be interested in exploring other options. I'd like some kinda nature image for the background - preferably a high quality photo of nature. Like the leaves, it needs to be able to tile nicely so that the page looks good on large resolutions and loads quickly. You would be surprised how hard it is to find nice tiled background images. Also, if anybody knows how to make an image into one that will tile correctly - that would also be a good thing to know.
Much of the code has been made a lot cleaner and all the design elements have now been moved to a seperate CSS file. I've learned quite a bit about CSS lately and hopefully the page looks and loads better on most computers. (Note: Please don't attempt to load this page in Internet Explorer. I don't have the time, patience, or access to a windows machine to make this site load correctly on that POS).
As you can see on the right I've added "dock apps." This was a great idea by Russ to have little XML snippets on the side. My contribution was the idea of an RSS feed reader. That was quite a hassle to implement but we've got it kinda worked out for now. So hopefully that makes the page a little more interesting. Also you'll notice that the page is now rendered from XML into HTML by the server and not by your web browser. Hopefully this will help with compatibility as well.
Also, I've made updates to the politics and personal sections of the site. I've also got plans in the works for series of articles based off a speech given by Mac developer Wil Shipley at 2005s WWDC. Also, we're trying to get more people to use the new lastholdout forum - so if you're board - feel free to go post something over there.