2006 Jul 14: A Project

Quick announcement and status update on a project that I started here.

Over the last couple of days anyone paying attention may have noticed that the gears at the top of the page have been changed from the primitive Flash based animation to what I think is a better looking animated GIF.

I am making this change due to a number of different reasons. The main reason is the lack of a Flash plugin from Adobe for 64-bit Linux systems. Another reason is that it seemed kind of silly to have a simple visual element be a technology that one needs a plugin to even see. Of course, the Flash version of the primitive gears was much smaller than the gears are now. But I was able to simplify the PHP and HTML that makes up this this by removing 15 lines of code and replacing it with one. And that one was from the original theme.

The change of the gears is only phase one of the overall project. Phase two is going to deal with some of the other visual elements of the theme. I am considering changing some of the fonts. I am also looking at making small changes to layout, possibly moving some of the side blocks out of the expanding blocks, and adding some additional graphics.

There may be a phase three. It depends on how things go in phase two. I am still not sure what a phase three would be, but I'll post more here as I think of it.