This site is based on the content managment system Textpattern, like many of my academic and professional sites (see, for example, Science for Peace).
Now mobile-friendly (sort of)!
I recently bought myself an iPod Touch and soon realised that — even though Apple’s little guy (and its Blackberry, Android, and other cousins) has a wonderfully powerful browser which scales down big and complex sites through a strange system of pixel-crunching, — it’s damned hard to navigate when one human finger covers about 40 pixels of screen space. So we now have an iPhone-specific stylesheet which should also work with other handheld devices, to serve up a no-nonsense, easily navigable version of the site.
Desktop users: now in two columns!
That doesn’t mean that desktop users can’t have the same visually rich layout that they used to enjoy. In this version, the text is set in two columns for greater readability (newspaper wisdom says that you should keep your line widths to an alphabet-and-a-half, a rule which often gets entirely bent out of shape on the web). There’s also a script which loads pages from my portfolio into an overlay (thank you, Greybox Redux, for a nice, light program). And the wider page — especially with the double columns — makes it a snap to go from one sample site to another without having to scroll all over the place.
CMSimple sites
Many of my playschool sites, and also my Bob Simons memorial site, use a flat-text content management system called CMSimple. I like deploying it on simpler sites — three-to-six-pagers — as it lets users edit their own pages without running the risk of breaking the templates and layouts (though if you know what you are doing, it’s also pretty easy to soup up a basic CMSimple site into something quite stylish).
kgsimons.org
This site has been active since January 2008.
Before kgsimons.org, my personal website was www.interlog.com/~ksimons, an inelegant name but one which came free with my ISP service. The site still exists, albeit as a museum piece. It was originally called “The Wonderful World of Monochrome” because for many years, I only had a black and white monitor. Following a family holiday in Bosnia, I renamed the site “A Streetcar named Oslobodenje,” which — though it is no longer updated — it is still called.
The background image is of Hypsibius dujardini, a tardigrade.