There is nothing excessively clever about my site design. But it is very easy to maintain and update and I thought others might be interested in how it’s put together.
Editing
I do not use any web page design tools, but prefer to edit my XHMTL and CSS directly. Is that silly? Probably, but touching the raw text markup feels better to me.
My editor of choice is BBEdit from BareBones Software. It’s a powerful text editor for Mac OS with much of the power and customizability of emacs, but the grace and ease of use one comes to expect on a Mac.
Server-side Includes
I use server-side includes to manage the content that is repeated across all my pages. In my current design the repeated content includes the navigation menu at the left and the feedback request below.
Since server-side includes are processed on the server, if you view the source of my pages in your browser it will appear as though the repeating content is duplicated in each page. Instead, each page includes a command like the following:
<!--#include virtual="style/top.shtml"-->
A similar command is used to include the footer content.
Cascading Style Sheets
I use a single cascading style sheet for the formatting and layout of all my pages. You can view the source text of my style sheet. By using the style sheet for formatting and layout, I can easily tweak the layout of the entire site by editing a single file.
Page last modified Monday, December 13, 2004.