The Realm of MasterPi

It’s been a while since I posted last, and in the meantime I’ve been working on creating a website for the Computer Science Community at RIT.  Designing many websites lately has led me to appreciate how far web standards have come since I learned HTML 4 with table-based design when I was younger.  It was a major pain to get anything fancy to work across multiple browsers; maybe it was partly due to my inexperience, but I think a lot of it has to do with improved support for standards.

I must also point out that I’m refusing to test my code on Internet Explorer 6, especially since I don’t have access to a copy to test it on.  For the large part I’m also not caring much about IE7 either for my personal site, though I’ve found that most things work well in both without extra tweaks.

My experience with web design recently has been almost pleasant, a nice break from the application or system level programming that I did mostly for school this year.  It’s good to work in a language where my artistic side can come out more easily, and to quickly create user interfaces that I am pleased with.  I think I’m going to look into re-learning LaTeX as well, on recommendation from a freind of mine.

Anyway, back to the CSC website.  This was a much more involved use of TYPO3 than before, using a lot more plugins to create a much more useful and interactive website.  It has News with RSS support, a Wiki, and Forums.  I’m slightly dissappointed that TYPO3 does not provide an easy way to hide frontend usernames/passwords from admins, at least in the most current version.

It made me realize however that I should probably just link it to one of RIT’s central authentication systems.  The passport.rit.edu system looks promising, almost like OpenID.  I did try to link it to OpenID, by the way, but the plugin requires that the OpenID server return some data other than basic authentication, which most OpenID servers (such as LiveJournal) do not provide by default.  If the RIT authentication attempt fails, I may go back to trying to get that working.

I think it’s a fairly attractive and useful site, but you’ll have to be the judge.  For now it is accessible at http://csc.masterpi.org/, but we’re hoping to move it to a Linux server with a .cs.rit.edu domain once school starts.

I notice that I’m tending to like very clean, minimalist design now, if I can branching off from a logo or theme as I did with the CSC logo.  Maybe I’m just lazy or maybe my subconcious is telling me the web is too cluttered looking and overly visually stimulating.  I generally don’t have lots of images to use, and my photo manipulation and drawing skills aren’t great, so maybe that’s why my designs are almost entirely judicious use of CSS.  Something to ponder anyway.