My undergraduate student page

I [mentioned previously][1] that part of my Intro to New Media homework was to post some writing assignments to my North Central College Web space. I’m presently working on the first of these assignments (a brief ethnography of an online community), and I figured I ought to at least put a basic site design together in advance. So, without further ado, check out [my school homepage][2]. Some brief notes: * It’s not very pretty. I’m a coder, not a designer. Sorry ’bout that. * I’m not thrilled with how the navigation links in the sidebar look. I’ll see if I can come up with something better to do with them. * It’s intentionally light on content. Except for required school assignments and a few other small pages, I plan to keep my school site simple and succinct. This blog (`bcat.name`) will continue to be my primary Internet presence in the long run. * Static pages were generated with the aid of [Poole][3], an amazing useful open-source templating engine written in Python. * I have primarily tested the site in Firefox 3.6, Chrome 8.0, and Safari 5. Due to time constraints, I have not yet done any testing in Opera; however, I suspect it renders equally well in this and any other modern, standards-friendly browser. * It looks pretty good in IE 8, surprisingly. Rendering is decent in IE 7 and IE 6, though some things are a bit suboptimal here. * The site makes heavy use of [HTML5 elements][4], and Remy Sharp’s [HTML5 shiv][5] is used to allow legacy IE versions to style new elements like `section` and `aside`. This has the unfortunate side effect of totally breaking the layout in Internet Explorer pre–version 9 when JavaScript is disabled. Since the (partially unstyled) content is still readable, I am honestly not very concerned about this. * One of the Web fonts the site tries to load (Fertigo Pro Italic) doesn’t work in Mobile Safari. Text in that font ends up totally invisible. I’m still trying to figure out what the problem is. * Feedback is, as always, quite welcome. If you spot a typo or a broken link, or if you just have some constructive criticism, don’t hesitate to contact me. [1]: http://bcat.name/posts/whitespace-text-readability-and-online-typography/ [2]: http://jdrascher.students.noctrl.edu/ [3]: https://bitbucket.org/obensonne/poole/src [4]: http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html [5]: http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/