Welcome to another edition of OddBall.net, the site with no real direction or purpose still going strong after 10 years, which says something profound and important about the nature of the Internet, but I'm not really sure what. Which also says something profound and important about the nature of the Internet.

This edition features a Quotes section plus an egotistical About Me section written sort of like a resume, plus some Unit Converters written as an excercise in DHTML and Javascript. The Endless and Lyrics sections remain largely unchanged, except I'm going to try DHTMLing up the lyrics, and try some AJAX while I'm at it. I'll shift all the personal and random pages into a personal section.

This is the second third redesign since the last, but the other one never made it out of the starting blocks. It's considerably lighter on design elements than my previous pages, and it's also not black for once! The image at top is a modified version of a Luis Royo image, the Spanish "Master of the Female Form". You can find more info on Mr. Royo and buy his artbooks here. There's a fair bit of advertising integrated into the site. I hope it's not obnoxious; twice a year or so it's enough for me buy a dvd or something.

As with most revisions of my site this has been as much a learning excercise in the practical use of technologies as anything else. As such the site is done in XHTML 1.1 (except two iframe pages in XHTML 1.0 Transitional) and makes use fairly heavy use of DHTML and Javascript. That means little compatibility HTML and stylesheets for everything. This site will likely only display properly in a modern browser.

A few design notes; I didn't let go of tables as I really should have. In a future update I'll work at making the site table-less. I wanted a very clean design without too much clutter, and I wanted it to be scalable rather than fixed (that's called "liquid" these days?) and work reasonably well in all sizes above 800x600. 1024 wide was the main design target.

One coding note; all of the XHTML, ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL on this site was written by me by hand with the exception of a Javascript snippet which inserts commas into numbers used in the conversion calculators, which was elegantly done with RegEx compared to my clunky parsing solution. It was taken from http://www.mredkj.com/javascript/nfbasic.html and is public domain. Using a lot of other people's code or code generators would defeat the point of this site being a coding excercise.