Empire Maintenance

I finally got around to refreshing the layouts of my various web properties, namely my web site and this blogger template. Let me tell you, both were in bad shape. The banner now reads "vortices" whereas before it was "Vezquex's Vortices". The branding change doesn't really make sense. The domain is vezquex.com, after all. But it was the best logo I have at the moment. It looks pretty sweet over the fantasy space background; don't you think? I lifted it from a Russian guy, but let's keep that between you and me ;). The menu has some new items and should be easier to navigate.

The image used to make the menu bar is now monochrome and transparent so that it can be an arbitrary color using a background color, plus it looks cool over an image. I took out the Friendfeed widget from my home page and moved to the blog's side bar. I adopted their technique of many favicons linking to profiles. I still want to better integrate this blog into the site, but I haven't decided exactly how to approach that.

I've also been doing a lot over on AppJet. The concept of throway apps is great. I wrote a two libraries, lib-subdomain and lib-style, just for making my other libraries look nicer. I've bundled some pretty useful things into lib-general. But I haven't forgotten about the apps. One I recently made is an anonymous (for now) message board with support for external images and mp3s. I'm actually trying to write a user account library, but there are some bugs in it that I haven't quite solved, so it's not finished. There is of course an existing library that does the same thing, but I don't like its execution. (My main gripe is that it sends you to a separate page to log in.) On the lighter side of things, I have rewritten the PHP Novebruary script in JavaScript on AppJet, with added support for Septogust, so mark your calendars. I'll reimplement the widget too.