So, the old site hosted on JHU‘s ACM site has finally been put to sleep. I wanted to move away from static HTML for a while. The primary motivation, however, was that I believe half the people that ever visited my previous site never realized that it scrolled to the right – sporting the unconventional horizontal layout. This still boggles my mind, but so does the fact the number one selling album right now is 50 Cent‘s “The Massacre”. That means that these people saw about 3% of the entire site.

45% out of the remaining 50% who realized it scrolled to the right thought I had no idea how to make a website, and that my HTML styles were “reckless” and “needing some serious discipline”. The remaining 5% (my mom, dad, and girlfriend) thought the site was “awesome” and “it was clear I put lots of time into it”. Hence, I had to take it out of it’s misery, much like that kid did to Ol’ Yeller, or CBS execs did to Doogie Howser, M.D after the fifth season. I think the current design is a fresh look for the new millennium…5 years too late. I’ve digitally preserved the old site, for those who never “experienced” it in all its raw goodness. I’m still planning on keeping my photo gallery on ACM’s server, though.

I created these web screen shots using this Windows software called SnagIT. It does a nice job if your page is vertically laid out. Of course, it falls on its face if your page scrolls to the right (or, to be fair, I spent 20 seconds trying to figure out how to get it to work on my site and gave up)…so I had to do some manual overlaying. I used a trial version of the software, and it seemed like it wanted to completely take over Windows, installing all these plug-ins in all MS Office applications and in IE…plus it wanted to install background apps. Homie don’t play that.