About this site
History
This site first went online October 12th, 2000. You're looking at the third site design since then.
Finding your way around this site
Just click links. Not all pages are linked in the navigation menu, some are only accessible through links found in texts. Some pages aren't even linked. Perhaps with the search page you can find them.
If your browser supports the [] selector for CSS, external links get rendered in some sort of brownish color. Internal links are red. Browsers that don't support this selector, but do support colour, render all links in red.
External links open in _blank (a new window, hopefully).
This all makes it behave like this: an external link and an internal link.
The logo
The logo is made with a nice little program called figlet. For this particular piece of art *cough*, I used:
figlet -kfslant Juerd.nl_
The underscore is green and should blink, like a cursor. Because it's a dark colour on a dark background, the blinking is not annoying.
The menu
The menu was originally inspired by those found on tuxje's site and Shiar's, but later I removed all moving parts.
Horizontal arrangement
CSS handles this well - no tables anymore! Well, I do add some table tags for known text browsers.
Internal format
For the content pages, I use an internal format. HTML is nice and stuff, but [me] is shorter than <a href="me">me</a>. The format that I use is documented and has been named MetaMarkup (thanks, lathos).
Every page has a source link (see below) that lets you view the source. Probably useless, but it was a simple eight line hack, including syntax colouring. (For this, Text::MetaMarkup is able to export its regular expressions. This is an undocumented feature, so read the source if you want this.)
Caching
The internal format is used to generate HTML, which is then sent to the browser. But this took 0.30 seconds. While this still isn't much, it does add to server load and it's just enough to make the site seem slow. Now, the pages are written to disk and only re-generated when they or their dependencies have changed.
I stole the timer idea from Shiar, and use the word "generated" for pages that are fresh and "assembled" for pages that come from the cache. Pages that use Perl code are never cached.
Generating a page no longer takes 0.30 seconds, but is as fast as retrieving a page from the cache. When testing, I had the regex debugger loaded, and it appears to have a global scope, slowing down all regexes mod_perl uses. The cache is not needed anymore, but it still makes loading pages 0.02 seconds faster than without it.