Web site rework

Any of you who have been to my web site recently have probably already noticed this, but I finally finished yesterday the last few things that I was planning on doing and am ready to make a real announcement.

All of my book reviews now exist primarily as regular web pages, complete with links to Powell's Books to buy the relevant books and with cover images where available. I'm still working on the infrastructure and scripts to make posting reviews as easy as it was before, but I do have turning a web page into a journal post automated at this point. Now I just need to automate the updating of the various index pages.

I've changed the look of all of my web pages, getting rid of the footer with my name and e-mail address and adding a navigation bar at the top and bottom of each page. I'd been thinking about doing the latter for quite a while (several years), but hadn't come up with a design that I liked. I finally got a good idea from Susan Stepney's web site. Now, I've gotten rid of the verbose and rather ugly-looking right-aligned navigation links and the only thing left of the footer is just the modification date.

I've also completely redone the links section of my page. Most of what was there was either very out of date or basically pointless. The new link pages should be somewhat more useful and better reflect my current interests.

There are still a lot of things that I want to do, including (as always) making more of the software that I've written available, further automating the handling of new book reviews, and figuring out what to do about various random technical notes. I'm still playing with the idea of putting the latter in a wiki, but I'm running into the problem that I hate editing things in a browser and also hate cutting and pasting into an editor window. To really make the wiki work, I need to write some code to let me more easily edit the pages. I could just use spin and maintain those pages like any other web page, too; that may be a better idea. I'm still dithering over that.

Oh, and now that I'm working on building Debian packages of various software, I want to come up with a good way of presenting information about the available packages. I haven't yet found any good software for generating web pages from Debian package description files, so I may write some of my own.