Radu Luchian(ov): Portfolio: Web:
Design of the Home Area

"Mark Twain once apologized for sending a 2 page letter instead of a one page by saying if he had time, he would have reduced it to one page. I guess your site is the same. :)"
-- Drew Kaplan, in an email message about this web site.

The site you are browsing is a showcase of my research in CHI and collaboration. The collaborative part is there only on the drawing board, but that should change eventually, with the implementation of the first Monade.

You may have noticed the emphasis on key words and concepts. In the same vein, here are a few dynamic widgets that I use on my site (call them visual cues).
(place your mouse cursor over the words below to see their descriptions)
- menu, notes, link notes, stickies site toolbar.
(Note: I am in the process of re-generating the site. Most pages do not yet have the color-coding described above. On those pages the notes, link notes and stickies look like blue text - with the links underlined, of course.)

As it is, my pages should be working well under Netscape 4.5 and higher, Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher and Opera 7 and higher. Please let me know if you use one of these browsers and something on my pages is not working right. Thanks.

Most of the evolution of my Home Area since I came to Canada is mirrored in the HomePageNews.

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HomePageScripts: Developed in the newest version of MonDoc I can manage, the navigation around the top level of my HomeArea and other DHTML tricks you see on all the pages (like the pop-out notes), are done with a single JavaScript file. This file is available for registration, or you can press the button at the right to pay for a one year subscription.
Hosting: right now my web area is hosted at linuxmotor.ca, a new (and gorgeous!!!) hosting service I'm trying out. Their server is pretty quick but I'm still trying to get back the hang of Unix and to rearrange my site. Their server seems to be several hours ahead of our EST (GMT-5) time, so when I upload stuff I have to go through the "file overwritten is newer than the uploaded file" dialog box.
Content: When I'll find the time, I'll have to reduce the text to one topic per page; the way it is now, some pages are long and boring to read. Also, I am NOT spell-checking my pages. Yep, that's right, the text that makes up the content of my pages comes right out of my fingers and into a plain text editor. So please tell me (in an email) if you find big morphological or grammatical errors on some page.
Design: Conceptually, I think I'm getting along well for my home area, with consistent navigation and a pretty flat hierarchical tree. Once my MonDoc project goes beta, I'll make version 7.1 completely dynamic, to reduce server activity, increase surfing speed through my pages and allow EVERY browser (maybe, even cell phones ), to see my pages one way or another.
Appearance: There are some issues I have with the current appearance: I'll have to check how other browsers render the HomeArea and adapt the templates or generate new ones for each of them bummer browsers.
Hardware: Currently I work on an 'antique' 1.8Ghz AMD Sempron OSed with Windows98se and WinXP (on separate partitions), and on a 900MHz Intel-based Tooshiba laptop. Under Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, the site is fast and plain-looking (effectively hiding its underlying complexity; maybe too much so ), so even as a prototype MonDoc is doing a pretty good job. Even if my screen size is 1280x1024 and color depth is 32bits, I develop for Standard SVGA (800x600, 256 colors).

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To Do:
- add access to specific stickies on the URL
- take the HomepageScript-specific ToDo from the MonDoc page and bring them here
- make the CSS for the notes and stickies DIFFERENT than normal links in shape, not only in color!
- edit the pricelist to make it usable, and to centralize PayPal management
- separate the templates from the functionality in the CBrowser
- finish the implementation of user View oprions (themes and such)
- make sure that each project and/or page that is subscribable has a link to the pricelist rather than directly to PayPal

Some history

• I wrote the first four versions at AUBG, roughly one version per year, as the technology advanced from the HTML proposed by NCSA with their Mosaic browser to version 4(beta) of the Netscape browser.
  the design: varied slightly, but it was always flowing. No fancy newspaper-like look for my pages, I'm afraid. I never use tables because they render all at once, after all the content is loaded. And the CSS layering also has its drawbacks. I prefer to let people on slow connection see stuff as it loads in their browsers. And I always had the site navigation (the top level page links) at the bottom of each file, in case of failure of the dynamic forms of navigation I'm using (currently those are floating on the left side of the pages).
• Version 5 is evolving at home; actually it's not a 'version' per se, because I keep modifying it as I learn more or as new technologies become available. It sits on my computer and it's an interface to my 2G data archive and to the consulting sub-area. The next versions are partial snapshots of this one.
  the design: is plain, no coloring, no fancy fonts, just a usable archive interface.
• Version 6 I had during my stay at NBU; I won second place with it in an internal competition for personal student pages. Also they seem to disagree with my design, because they ssi-appended a weird table at the bottom of each and every page
  Technically though, I was not very happy with that shape of my pages. They work fine in Explorer 5.5, but the object system inconsistencies in the various JavaScript implementations decided me to generate the pages dynamically, with a similar look and slightly different feel for each type of browser.
  the design: was dark; light text on a dark red background, mirroring my mood.
• Version 7 (the current one), is developed with the MonDoc version of HYMNS, and the JavaScript objects I use for it are a project in themselves, my HomePageScripts described on 16May2002.
  the design: is by default light, with a cloudy scheme for the dynamic menu, and a postit-like stickie stack. But I'm working to add skinning, so that my visitors can choose how this site will look and function for them.

One bit o'talk about archives, since I have quite few of them (even of Web sites due to actual sites I worked on which went AWOL): like me, Terry is of the opinion that linking to content on the Web is not a good strategy in this very dynamic medium, where whole areas can appear in days and disappear just as quickly. He suggests mirroring as an alternative, but in most cases the effort involved in keeping mirrored sites synchronized is not efficient enough. I would suggest that each link one makes to content outside one's own domain should be logged at the target of the link so that any time a modification is done, the link owner can be automatically sent an update message. But who's listening to me? ;) I'll just chug along on MonDoc.

Comic Sans Serif

This is the font I use for my pages. In the odd case when the text doesn't look on your system like the text in the illustrations, get this font (161k) and extract it on your machine in C:\Windows\Fonts