Random Field Enters Beta
2007/10/26Random Field is now open in beta. Don't worry, this won't be a Google style perpetual beta. I just wanted to get on with the writing despite the present lack of design.
Don't expect too much of the design. After all, I'm not a graphic artist, nor am I a Web developer in any kind of professional sense. I drink coffee for a living. That isn't to say that I am completely inexperienced. I learned HTML in the days when all the technical knowldge needed to get a decent site up could fit on a note card or two.
When working with Web sites, I'm a big fan of abstraction. This site, in its present state of undesign will need changes on every page I put up until the design is something that I can live with. Naturally, I don't want to make these changes in every page manually. This, in addition to being boring, is highly error prone. I'm not the first person to notice a need for more abstraction than the separation of design and content available with CSS. Some fill this need with content management systems, server side scripts, or tools designed specifically for creating Web sites. For a site like this with no dynamic or user generated content I prefer to hack my own abstraction layer and generate the files that make up the site locally for testing before sending the files to the server.
The main engine of abstraction here is an old, supposedly addictive program called m4. Any markup that is common or only slightly different in a regular way across many pages is expressed as a macro. When writing a new page, I use these macros instead of HTML. A nice side effect of this is that I can generate nice looking PDF files from the same source files as are used to generate HTML.