About this site

This site is the primary personal site of John Havard. This buffoon has a ridiculous number of domains, so you'll likely see this design on several different domains.

The site is built using Template Toolkit with content sourced from files on the file system rather than generated from a database like a madman. Outside of write-once, read-never social media, most sites have a surprisingly small number of updates to the point that you could probably train your grandmother to update raw html without much issue. Toss in a little automation with Template Toolkit and some additional perl to make some tedious tasks a little easier, mix in version control, and you will soon have a nice system that requires no database.

The design is heavily inspired by the look of CNN.com between 1999 and 2002. Both CNN and Fox News were pretty much the only two news organizations that actually posted a large amount of stories each day. It wasn't until later in the year in 2001 that news sites actually started being useful. No clue why that happened. None at all.

I had started with the Bad Idea™ that I would use tables for layout just like we used to, because the last time I had mucked around with CSS grid, it wasn't well supported in browsers. I quickly remembered the reasons we abandoned tables for layout and suffered with no longer being able to vertically align content in a reliable manner for over a decade. Well, turns out browsers finally agree on things, though half the tutorials out there on CSS grid reference some never-implemented aspects which confuse things. If only there were a definitive guide for CSS. So, after learning all the new features in CSS that were implemented after 2003, I was able to redo the design using grid and flexbox in short order, and then spent a few days reworking it to "componentize" certain aspects of the design that made it easier to actually make use of the "cascading" part of CSS along with a few other benefits.

As of 7pm on 2/21/2024, I have actually posted a couple of items. I have quite a bit of work to do, mainly with bringing in old stories and such, but we will get rid of the filler junk eventually.

Thank you for stopping by. Hope you have a wonderful day.

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