Articles - Reviews, criticism. anecdotes and my musings.

About - Info about myself.

Mozilla - Tools to help test the open source browser.

The Pit - Unfinished ideas and failed projects.

Contact me - Spelling and grammar corrections welcome.

Site motivation

Since I have had a lot of free time, recently, I decided to finally create a personal homepage.

Web presence is a useful thing and everyone wants to be able to show an example of their work. I'm always harping on about how I think sites should be designed and I never bothered design one for myself. It would also give me a chance to show off my mad (copy) cat HTML skillz.

Unfortunately, I love low bandwidth pages. Such pages have a minimalist attraction, degrade to virtually any browser and best of all, load super-fast. It's one thing to be able to write a cool looking Shockwave site but if you have to wait 10 minutes for it to be displayed what's the point?

After a few hours of hard brainstorming and dozens of prototypes I realised it would be far easier to borrow someone else's look and feel and adapt it to my needs. Before anyone accuses me of blatant plagiarism, I would like to say that at no point did I look at the source of any sites during the design of my own.

Initially, I was going to go with a bordered design similar to the one on the Winamp site but after taking a second look at it, I decided that such a site would be too much work to maintain. Besides, designing a site on black goes against my principles. After toying with a Builder.com rip off I finally arrived at the best solution of all -a tribute to salon.com.

Another rumour going round is that this site looks like Edge (a UK videogames magazine). This cannot possibly be the case:

1. slant is not printed on Royal Press 90gsm.
2. I'm not ashamed of my low number of hits.
3. Edge purports to be "The future of interactive entertainment". I do not claim that a whole industry will evolve into slant.

I really hope no one takes offence to this because I'm not especially rich right now and cannot afford a copyright infringement case. I like to think of it as a case of reverse engineering. What's that? Reverse engineering is illegal? Ah well, only a few dozen people are ever going to see this site anyway...