Ohoho! Yet Another New Design!
February 06, 2008

Well, overall the reaction to my last design was less than stellar. David thought there was low alignment, James thought it was too white and Andy... he thinks everything sucks. In honor of my new position of Webmaster at W3i I've decided to take some time to rework my existing design and make it a little more interesting. You'll notice the return of my fancy diagonal bars from an old design, and a whole lot of green. I like green (and I want to remind David of his lifelong goal of reworking his blog to appear as a console application).

I'm planning on tweaking some of the colors and to revisit how to make the "content" area of the page appear a little more in sync with everything else. For now though, this is what it is. James should be happy with the darkness and David should be happy with the alignment. :)

Keep an eye out for more Caturday announcements too. Since I've been accepted at W3i as an ASP.NET developer I'm going to be stepping up my personal exploration of the technology. Alas, my MacBook is ill equipped (what with running OSX and all) for .NET development so my time on campus must be devoted to other things. Mayhaps some Parallels investment may be in order. Who knows?

My current plans are to get my new reworking of the Caturday page up and running on a Virtualized computer on my machine at home. I'm hoping that performance will be acceptable, because I'd hate to have to invest in another machine *just* to run Windows Server and IIS.

While all of that is going on at home, I'm intended to keep up with Listforge development during my time at school - just to keep my deliciously useful Ruby on Rails skills up. I'm also very excited that there doesn't appear to be too much limitation at W3i, so I might actually get to use Microsoft's new MVC Development Toolkit to get my MVC groove on.

OnyxRaven 2008/02/06

Is there no mono for osx? I thought asp.net ran in mono at this point.

Paralells is definitely a godsend though. I've heard good things about VMWare Fusion too - which intrigues me a bit because their vm images are portable between platforms. I'd have figured you still had another machine laying around for games and such. You only need xp pro to run IIS don't you?

I can see where your design skills have been applied at your new position ;-). I hope I get a little time to work on my template - wordpress makes it pretty simple so I should be able to make mine look spiffy instead of using a prebuilt one.

OnyxRaven 2008/02/06

erp - it looks as if its possible to run xsp and it'll serve up asp.net! (google says so).

phantomdata 2008/02/07

Oh, heh. I've got a Vista machine at home - but my Macbook is what travels with me to campus where I have most of my time. I also have an Ubuntu box at home that runs my http://cats.phantomdata.com server as well as a myriad of other network services that I use.

I will have to check out xsp too, thanks for mentioning it. Much appreciated!

david 2008/02/07

yes, you can use vmware fusion. one of the guys at work is running it. he prefers it over parallels. he blogged about his view here: http://www.michaelfransen.com/?p=97 - he says that there is virtually no performance difference.

Brandon Bowman 2008/02/07

I recommend getting VMware Fusion, because then you can also plop the VM on your Ubuntu box and run the free VMware Server.

Congratulations on the new job sir.

Interestingly enough, I just did a redesign/relaunch too, plz be seeing, http://www.inatree.org/2008/02/06/welcome/

phantomdata 2008/02/07

I will definitely be looking into Fusion then. I've looked into VMware's products in the past, but there are just /so/ many of them that I never know what is the most appropriate. Thanks for all the suggestions guys.

David; Yay! One of the Mike's has a blag!
Brandon: Oooh, it's very nice. Keep adding new content my sir and I'll get you back in the links section shortly! (and thank you for the congrats.)