Radu Luchian(ov): Portfolio: Web:
Design of the Home Area

"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. :)"
-- link outDrew 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 Like many other pages, it may sound in part outdated.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.
HomePageScripts: Developed in the newest version of MonDoc I can manage, the navigation around the top level of my HomeArea and other DHTML tricks you see on all the pages (like the pop-out notes), are done with a single JavaScript file. This file is available for registration, or you can press the button at the right to pay for a one year subscription.
Hosting: right now my web area is hosted at canadianwebhosting.ca, a more than decent hosting service I've been with since April 2008. Their server is pretty quick but I'm still trying to get the hang of Linux remote automation and automate the deployment of my site changes, the downloading of server logs and directory file comparisons before Monade's server side can do it. Their server farm seems to be in PT (GMT-8) in their Vancouver data center (they auto-sync to their Toronto data center), so when I upload stuff via FTP I have to go through the "file overwritten is newer than the uploaded file" dialog box. If Amazon ever bundles any AWS hosting in their Prime offerings, I may consider deploying there too.
Content: When I'll find the time, I'll have to reduce the text to one topic per page; the way it is now, some pages are long and sometimes hard to follow. Also, I am NOT spell-checking my pages. Yep, that's right, the text that makes up the content of my pages comes right out of my fingers and into a plain text editor. So please tell me (in an email) if you find big errors on some page.
Design: Conceptually, I think I'm getting along well for my home area, with consistent navigation and a pretty flat hierarchical tree. Once my MonDoc project goes beta, I'll make version 7.1 completely dynamic, to reduce server activity, increase surfing speed through my pages and allow EVERY browser (maybe even cell phones smile), to see my pages one way or another. As of 2020, the CSS used is smart enough to adapt to smaller screens.
Appearance: There are some issues I have with the current appearance: I'll have to check how other browsers render the HomeArea and adapt the templates or generate new ones for each of the bummer browsers. Luckily now with Chromium powering most of them, the only other one to test with is Firefox and its several forks.
Hardware: Currently I work on a trailing edge 2.4Ghz AMD A10-7850K APU with Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics with XLinux and Win7 (on separate drives). Under Internet Explorer Chromium, the site is fast and clean-looking even on my older hardware I test with every once in a while, so as a prototype MonDoc is doing a pretty good job. My screen size is 4k but I keep it at 2560x1440 and color depth is 32bits, but I still develop for XGA (1024x768, 16k colors).

To Do:

Some history

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.