It's been a long time since I've fiddled with my home page. The new site is designed around a simple PHP script. I hope you like the new design.

For those of you looking to implement something similar, the index.php script (view source) reads standard HTML files, extracting the TITLE text, and creates the page with a seasonal image banner (rotated each day), title bar, content from the HTML file, and then the sidebar with links. All of the content is put in a big table because not all browsers support CSS positioning. If you click on the "Printable Version" link at the top right corner of the page, the table surrounding the HTML file is omitted and a slightly different stylesheet is used.

The .htaccess file contains the mod_rewrite directives needed to redirect HTML file access through the script:

".htaccess"
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(.*slideshow.html)$
RewriteRule ^(.*\.html)$ /~mike/index.php?$1
RewriteRule ^blog$ /~mike/index.php?all
RewriteRule ^blog/$ /~mike/index.php?all

Weblog-style articles are stored in a "blog" subdirectory and automatically indexed by the index.php script. A separate script generates an RSS feed of the latest 10 articles.

All of the photo pages are generated by my flPhoto software. Except for the slideshow pages, the image pages are wrapped by the index.php script just like any other HTML page.

Feel free to comment on the new site or ask questions about its implementation by emailing me at "mike@easysw.com"...