A post for organizing my thoughts on the inspirations and resources used for this website's design. Hopefully you find it useful as well.
Read more…lab notes: usl
notebooks
Research Papers - These are mostly intended to be evergreen documents - expect updates. They will include standalone articles but also research for hardware projects, software, and site development.
Blogs - Short form content on various topics.
topics
- usl - ultrasciencelabs
- greymatter post archive
- drupal post archive
- the web
- web development
- models
- paper planes
lab notes: usl
Sometime around 2003 I registered the ultrasciencelabs domain and built a website where I could share projects - mostly case mods. Later it became a sandbox for experimenting with various open source CMS platforms. Eventually it went the way of many domains - neglected and lapsed.
Lately I've wanted a place to record and share my project work. A place under my own control- not tethered to an ad-fueled social media site or here-today gone tomorrow blogging platform. A small, lightweight, simple, self-hosted 'homepage' styled like my early 2000s web projects. No tracking cookies, no analystics, no SEO, no javascript bloat, or endless DB queries.
I'm using Datenstrom Yellow as the site "CMS". It uses PHP scripts to generate HTML from markdown files and folder structures. It's easy to use and very fast. Since no database is involved it is very portable- it's just files and folders.
And to kick things off I scraped through my old data CDs and put together a website list pulled from old browser bookmark backups under Archives linkroll. All the sites are great examples of the 'old' net. An eclectic mix ranging from bare-bones .edu pubnix homepages to experimental art projects. Enjoy!
updated 2024/02/29
Due to a spot of neglect on my part, A recent server upgrade led to a domain routing error and my URL directed traffic to a hopelessly bad spam site catering to MySpace users. Joy. The issue is resolved, but artifacts remain. Uploaded images and my sub-domains were erased from the digital ether and a prolonged session of file uploads seems in order. More soon.
Read more…I updated the Drupal engine to version 4.7.2 this morning. The transition has been fairly smooth. Some new features have farked a bit of the non-essential content display, but I've been tossing around the idea of refactoring a lot of the site anyway. There is too much elbow room on the site for the tiny amount of content it contains.
Logging in to the site this morning form work I couldn't help but notice that IE is actually displaying the site content mostly properly. Perhaps some float model bugs were fixed? Of course, if that is the case I may have some other tweaking to do on other site layouts. After all, creating pixel prefect layouts with CSS almost requires hacks in order to maintain consistent rendering across a myriad of buggy or inconsistent browsing platforms. Now as far as USL is concerned, my CSS-based template is specifically designed without any IE hacks. Why? Simple. Microsoft told me to do it. No lie. The upcoming IE7 will render the current list of IE7 hacks obsolete... or so they say. Anyway, their assurances and my compunction to minimize and strive for standards compliance has left my personal sites in a state of IE limbo for years now. Missing PNG24 support, broken CSS float models, and host of other issues have hindered or outright thwarted many of my more creative CSS efforts. Perhaps it's time to try creative design once again.