welcome to the first blogpost!

i've been hard at work on this site for the last couple days. i got version 1.0 to a publishable state from scratch in about 7 hours yesterday, and replaced the previous version of the site with that one last night. there were a few remaining hiccups and incomplete bits of code i still had to polish though, which i chipped away at today.

for a quick list of changes: i fixed the titlebar's CSS, so that it stretches to the edges of the screen in modern browsers instead of being a weird floating block over the body text. i also decided on the solution i was going to use for this blog, which had previously been a "coming soon" page. this solution is basically just writing each blogpost as a simple HTML file, which is too manual to be good for a guestbook, but the guestbook is a low priority and complex problem anyway - i want to have a way to resist spam, and i want it to be possible to sign it without any javascript, such as in lynx. the solution i'm thinking of for that right now is some kind of templated form submission, where i manually approve people's signatures by copying over the text to the public, static site myself. that'll still be quite manual, but it'll run in any browser that this site runs in, and it prevents spam by putting me in between the submitter and the webpage. is this a boneheaded, web 1.0 way of doing it? sure. but that's kinda this site's style, isn't it? :)

i've now been able to test the site on several computers - a modern laptop with a 1920x1080 screen, a decent CPU, and 8 gigs of RAM; this one with a 1366x768 screen, a slow CPU, and 2 gigs of RAM; and my old ThinkPad with a 1024x768 screen, a pentium III, and 256 megs of RAM. it works alright in netsurf on all those machines, but netBSD's version of dillo on the ThinkPad seems to misbehave and display the navbar all weird. strangely, the version of dillo on this laptop displays it just fine (it's supposed to render in dillo as a thin horizontal bar, like it does in the text mode browsers), so maybe netBSD ships an older version with worse CSS handling?

if you're browsing in dillo, and you've been having issues with the layout, feel free to contact me however you please, and tell me what operating system, and preferably, what version of dillo you're on. that'll help me narrow down any specific versions of dillo that are problematic.

that bug aside, 1.1 is ever so slightly more polished and nicer to use across all browsers. i feel like all the most important stuff about the site, visually anyway, is now there. i will be going through and adding more content to various WIP or incomplete sections next, and then maybe working on prettifying the site a bit more while keeping it compatible in the more distant future (some monochrome, dithered images and simple icons would be nice, at least). this is how you can expect this site to look for the next several months, though, aside from minimal tweaks and bugfixes when needed.