James' Website
About
This is a site where I write about stuff. I thought I might fill it with programming articles but now that my family and friends read it, it has become more of a dumping site for trinkets and ramblings. I probably would have been better off with a Blogger account or something similar, but I wanted to write my own blogging software.
funkallstars.net
I used to be in a pretty awesome band called the Burlington Junior Funk All-Stars, and this was the URL I registered for our website. That band broke up. My new band, Quadrafonics, has a website at quadrafonics.com.
Layout
The site layout is an experiment in how small and simple I can get. An average article page with images and CSS weighs in at about ten kilobytes. With output caching turned on, the web server hardly has to blink to serve up a page. I think that with this approach I could survive having a semi-popular article despite my modest bandwidth. I'll let you know if that ever happens.
Originally I cloned the Commodore 64 interface, which had both low bandwidth and nerd appeal. But the C64's blue-on-blue colour scheme was not great for people with glasses, so I dumped it for the current layout. The Space Invaders characters at the top rotate every day, and since they're stretched pixel art they're about fifty bytes each.
Software
JBlog is some blogging software that I made. It uses C#, ASP.NET and Firebird. It makes posts, supports commenting, and has an RSS feed. It's multi-user, and also runs the news section of quadrafonics.com.
Google Links
I made a C# usercontrol that links invisibly through Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature. So instead of a link pointing to "http://www.yahoo.com," you can make one that points to "yahoo." When you click it, Google searches for the term and forwards you to the first search result. It solves the problem of dead links, and the link will change over time to point to the most appropriate page for that text. Here's the embarassingly simple source code.