"Mark Twain once apologized for sending a 2 page letter instead of a one page by saying if he had time, he would have reduced it to one page. I guess your site is the same. :)"
-- Drew Kaplan, in an email message about this web site.
The site you are browsing is a showcase of my life-long research in CHI and collaboration.
Why does it look like this?
You may have noticed the emphasis on key words and concepts. In the same vein, here are a few dynamic widgets that I use on my site (call them visual cues).
When you see colorful words like the ones below, see their dynamic descriptions:
- On a computer, place your mouse cursor over them.
- On a mobile device, long-tap simulates mouseover events; to see where links lead, long-tap them first.
- menu,
notes,
link notes,
stickies
site toolbar.
Notes:
- I am in the process of re-generating the site. Hyperlinks on some pages do not yet have the color-coding described above. On those pages, links look like underlined green text.
- The collaborative aspect of these pages is on the drawing board, but that should change eventually, with the implementation of the first Monade.
Since 2006, my pages should be working well under Netscape 4.5 and higher, Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher and Opera 7 and higher. More recently, I've been using Chrome for development, and the others just for testing. Please let me know if you use one of these browsers and something on my pages is not working right. Thanks.
Most of the evolution of my Home Area since I came to Canada is mirrored in the HomePageNews.
This page is mostly as it was in 2009. Like many other pages, it may sound in part outdated. To be edited little by little when I have time.
To Do:
- verify and simplify the browser-specific templating
- change the note- and postit-triggering events to work better with mobile devices
(click/tap for note and another click/tap for the postit)
- add CSS-based collapsible lists
- add the automated site map
(collapsible link list with collapsible internal postits sub-links)
- add the automated RecentChanges list
(client-sortable by date collapsible by month or year, or site-section collapsible by sub-directory)
- add access to specific stickies on the URL (done. testing)
- add print view (plain text, with hyperlinks after, in parantheses and data bits at the end, in Footnote format; links css-highlight the section they lead to; trade context for linearity, searchability)
- save the location of moved post-its at least for the life of the page
- or in the URL, several stickies, each with its x-y location
- take the HomepageScript-specific ToDo from the MonDoc page and bring them here
- make the CSS for the notes and stickies DIFFERENT than normal links in shape, not only in color!
- get the CCS for the pop-up notes to *slowly* fade them over time down to something like 55-60%
- edit the pricelist to make it usable, and to centralize PayPal management
- separate the templates from the functionality in the CBrowser
- finish the implementation of user View options (themes and such)
- make sure that each project and/or page that is subscribable has a link to the pricelist rather than directly to PayPal
- finish adding the page template skins
- complete the site settings functionality
(third button in the site toolbar at the top of the pages)
- add a page button in the site toolbar at the top of the pages, to expand all content
- notes as parantheses and stickies as page sections, with links to them from their triggers
- when pages are expanded, the expand button becomes `collapse page` and after it render a new button to `print page`
- make the postits draggable (done, tested)
Some history
- I wrote the first four versions at AUBG, roughly one version per year, as the technology advanced from the HTML proposed by NCSA with their Mosaic browser to version 4(beta) of the Netscape browser.
the design: varied slightly, but it was always flowing. No fancy newspaper-like look for my pages, I'm afraid. I never use tables because they render all at once, after all the content is loaded. And the CSS layering also has its drawbacks. I prefer to let people on slow connection see stuff as it loads in their browsers. And I always had the site navigation (the top level page links) at the bottom of each file, in case of failure of the dynamic forms of navigation I'm using (currently those are floating on the left side of the pages).
- Version 5 is evolving at home; actually it's not a 'version' per se, because I keep modifying it as I learn more or as new technologies become available. It sits on my computer and it's an interface to my 2G data archive and to the consulting sub-area. The next versions are partial snapshots of this one.
the design: is plain, no coloring, no fancy fonts, just a usable archive interface.
- Version 6 I had during my stay at NBU; I won second place with it in an internal competition for personal student pages. Also they seem to disagree with my design, because they ssi-appended a weird table at the bottom of each and every page
Technically though, I was not very happy with that shape of my pages. They work fine in Explorer 5.5, but the object system inconsistencies in the various JavaScript implementations decided me to generate the pages dynamically, with a similar look and slightly different feel for each type of browser.
the design: was dark; light text on a dark red background, mirroring my mood.
- Version 7 (the current one), is developed with the MonDoc version of HYMNS, and the JavaScript objects I use for it are a project in themselves, my HomePageScripts described on 16May2002.
the design: is by default light, with a cloudy scheme for the dynamic menu, and a postit-like stickie stack. But I'm working to add skinning, so that my visitors can choose how this site will look and function for them.
the hardware: I still have the 'antique' computers on which I developed this version in the lower 2000s: 1.8Ghz AMD Sempron OSed with Windows98se and WinXP (on separate partitions), and on a 900MHz Intel-based Tooshiba laptop. Under Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, the site is fast and plain-looking (effectively hiding its underlying complexity; maybe too much so ), so even as a prototype MonDoc is doing a pretty good job. My screen size was 1280x1024 and color depth is 32bits, but I was developing for Standard SVGA (800x600, 256 colors).
On external links
One bit o'talk about archives, since I have quite few of them (even of Web sites due to actual sites I worked on which went AWOL): like me, Terry is of the opinion that linking to content on the Web is not a good strategy in this very dynamic medium, where whole areas can appear in days and disappear just as quickly. He suggests mirroring as an alternative, but in most cases the effort involved in keeping mirrored sites synchronized is not warranted. I would suggest that each link one makes to content outside one's own domain should be logged at the target of the link so that any time a modification is done, the link owner can be automatically sent an update message. But who's listening to me? ;) I'll just chug along on MonDoc. If something disappears, I'll hunt it on the WaybackMachine as long as that exists, or hunt down an alternative. Besides... nowadays copyright laws may bite me if I decide to store copies of other people's content.