Dr Karl Stolley

Chicago, IL (Updated 3/16/2008 10:50AM)—

After months of on-again, off-again work, I’m finally at the point where this new version of my website is viable.

I’ve put a lot of thought (too much, perhaps...this has been in the works for months) into the site. What I am after is a place that is a dynamic, central part of my research activity and teaching. This blog is a major part of that: a place to open up larger fragments of thinking on their way to being published material. I’ve tried blogging a time or two before, but never had a clear purpose behind it. I think now that I’m beyond graduate school and working intensely toward publication, that purpose is much more clear.

In addition to this blog is another resource type that I’ve imaginatively called Notes, which will allow for brief mentions of ideas and things that I’d rather not have fill up a blog. Given that I usually have at least three separate notebooks going at a given time (currently a little Moleskine that I treasure, a green steno book, and a large bound sketchbook), I’ve long wanted a digital place to keep the best of those jots.

In addition to the blog and notes resources, I want to add a means for storing citations in a bibliography-friendly format tied to my tagging system, so as to generate topical bibliographies automatically for students and colleagues alike. I’m patiently waiting for either the Zotero people to create a remote, database-driven (and, with any luck, self-hostable) companion to what is now just a Firefox plugin. Ultimately I might just build my own system, but for now I’ll continue jockey between EndNote and Zotero.

Also, this new site better reflects best practices in Web design as I know and teach them. Production is the link between my research and teaching, so I’m excited have built a lot of current standards into this site.

The site is grounded in Web standards, employing CSS, DOM Scripting, and XHTML Strict. Although there’s no shortage of markup, it’s all semantic and valid; yes, there are <div> tags, to be sure, but only to group related things.

Among the other features of this site:

• Use of the hCard (contact information), rel-tag, and rel-license microformats (get the Operator extension for Firefox to see how these work)
• Licensing all content under Creative Commons
• RSS Feeds for the blog, notes, and tags, and per-tag items (a podcast feed is coming too, once I start podcasting)
• Use of the 1 Bit Audio Player (which, again, won’t appear anywhere until I start podcasting)
• AJAX-powered comment (on the blog) and email forms
• Lots of links for viewing items by date (specific days, months, and years)
• Use of the Google Prettify script for making code examples more readable (code? did I just say code?)

There’s more to come, too. Right now, the Portfolio section is basically the old version of this site; improvements and matching design to come later this spring, as part of my annual report at IIT.