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Monday, November 5, 2007
Fourmilab Navigation Pages Revised, New Site Map
I have just completed an overhaul of the Fourmilab site's navigation pages, which are generated automatically by a home-brew content management system cobbled together from a Perl program and make. The revision applies the uniform Fourmilab site-wide style to topic pages and displays them with margins which keep the text from running into the edges of the frame. The most substantial change is the replacement of the 1994-style global site map (which, although sporadically updated, was missing many items added in the last several years and, in any case, was of unwieldy length and difficult to navigate) with a modern-style site map organised as a set of nested bulleted lists. This map is generated automatically from the topic descriptions used in the hierarchical navigation pages, so there's no need to maintain two parallel navigation mechanisms. The new site map can be accessed, as was the original, from the left navigation pane of the home page, a link in the main welcome page, or from the text displayed by browsers which do not support frames when viewing the home page.Posted at November 5, 2007 22:18