We've MOVED!

Hey, I've got a proper website all made up and you can come check it out at Tabula-Imago.com! I'll still blog here but the reviews will be mostly on the new site. My old site will stay up so you can check the reviews that are here.

I hope you like it. It's been a real effort to get done. I found a free template by cruising the web and edited it with some free editors. I want to use this as sort of repository of stuff that doesn't go anywhere else. I've got a place for essays, a proper archive and everything.

Building the site has been a real pain in the ass. Since I don't have a job right now I've had to use all freeware and unlicensed images. Freeware is cool but it's not the most stable of tools. I use Mozilla's WYSIWYG HTML editor KompoZer and good old text editor Notepad ++. Basically when something didn't work in KompoZer I'd shuffle over to Notepad ++. There was quite learning curve, especially after coming from things like MoveableType/WordPress/Blogger composing that is primarily template based.


All my reviews are written using OpenOffice Writer. It works well most of the time and can do just about anything that you can do with MS Office, though it may take an extra step or digging through an extra menu. Such is the life of the open source user.


I'm especially proud of my banner image. I used images available from Wikipedia that had Creative Commons license and used GIMP 2.4 to make my banner image, and I'm really proud of it and I think it looks great!

I really recommend all the tools I list here and they do the job, even if it's a slow job. Of course a lot of that has to do with my poor web-design skills. I was able to find some great templates (HERE) and picked a nice one that was rather simple and clean.

A long time ago when I was reading about blogging and web design the two most important things I learned were that the internet is content driven and that access to content is the most important part.

In short this means that if you want people to keep coming to your site you have to stay constant with the new content (especially in the ADD world of blogging) and that simple clean site navigation allows people to get to it. So all my designs and template choices are probably considered pedestrian, if not down right boring. But you can read all the content and it's easy to access.

I know it's presumptuous to think that anyone reads this but I enjoy the work and keeps me from sinking into depression or other unpleasantness.

I'm a poster-child for the DIY (and Do It for Cheap) ethic. I hope you guys get something out of this.

Happy New Year!