Finally, I have a website !!

A weekend of hacking, some static HTML pages spiced with CSS and Javascript and I have a presence on the internet. I just published the last commit to github and have a decent looking website up and running. The site is available here
Some of the requirements that I had set are
  • Progressive Javascript, the site should work without CSS/Javascript also
  • Only static content would be possible as the site is hosted on github
  • Most contents of the site have unique URLs. 
I would not rant on the design or the code of the site, instead I would simply highlight two interesting challenges that I came across while building the site.

The site is static, but I wanted the home page to have posts from this blog displayed. I also wanted to show randomly picked projects too. The feedburner javascript had all the content preceeded with a document.write. Since I was loading this content using jquery's $.load, document.write was executed in the window content and hence, overwrote the page contents. The way this was solved was to load all this content in an iFrame. The iFrame calls a method in the container document with the HTML content that is displayed with the formatting.

The second challenge was having fragment identifier as a navigator. Though a well known pattern, the only deviation in this case was that the module names and HTML should be the same. The javascript does not poll for the URL fragment identifier yet, but it does change when the user navigates to a project, etc.

Please do check out the site which is more of a cataloged archive for this blog.