IMS_Blog

Because I forget stuff. Part of norcimo.com

Note: It appears you must have reached this page by a deep level URL. In general this site is currently down and unmaintained. See here

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General

IMS_Blog recieved it's first post on 6th January 2004. That post simply announced that the blog was coming, and the whole thing was very much still being built. The first real post not related to setting the blog up was on 11th January 2004. The blog started as part of my main site, and because I'd taken to reading quite a few people's blogs and thought I'd like a go myself. It seems to have become the only part of my site actually regularly updated. Originally my site was hosted on the Univeristy of York's servers, in my personnal web space. It was powered by Blogger. In about June 2004 I realised that the University account wouldn't exist much longer as I was coming to the end of my PhD. It was at that point I bought my first domain name and found some hosting. I had been becoming increasingly frustrated with some of Blogger's lack of functionality (though it had served me well as a beginner) and so decided to make the plunge to a more advanced content management system. Hence the blog is now powered by MovableType. IMS_Blog is a place for me to put my thoughts, mention random things I've done so that in years to come I can look fondly (or not so fondly) back at them, and generally put any bits of information I feel might be useful.

The content of IMS_Blog is covered by a Creative Commons License. See the copyright notice for more information. For those of you really interested in the technical aspects of the blog, read on. Otherwise, I suggest you return to IMS_Blog.

Technical

IMS_Blog is powered by MovableType 3.2. The pages are all written to be compliant with CSS 2.1 standards and XHTML 1.0 Strict standards (actually the pages would probably be XHTML 1.1 compliant but I'd have to serve them with a mime type IE doesn't understand). The page layout is all produced using CSS with what I hope is fairly semantic underlying markup (for legacy reasons, the blog has undergone a couple of redesigns, some pages are a little better than others). The last update to the blog's design was in December 2004. I'll describe here some of the techniques used. If you want to know about any technical aspect of the construction of IMS_Blog, or indeed norcimo.com in general, please feel free to contact me (also send bug reports!)

CSS Layout

Conceptually the layout is broken into two, or three parts. The two main parts are the navigation area on the left and the blog itself. The blog is further split into a banner section, the main content (i.e. posts) and the sidebar (containing archives, blogroll, etc.).[Under Construction].