This website contains an assortment of things that might be of use to others but don’t have a home anywhere else. There is a table of contents under the “subjects” link, and most pages contain a search box. Online information about my physics research is more likely to be found at my official Naval Research Laboratory web page.

Subscription

If you would like to stay informed about new material and other things that I think are interesting, use the address of my atom (“RSS without the sociopaths”) feed at http://www.lee-phillips.org/updates.xml in your feed reading software (NetNewsWire, slrn, Google Reader, etc.). You can also follow a brief version of the feed, containing just titles and links, on Twitter.

Contact

General-purpose email can be sent to lee@lee-phillips.org, but comments on specific articles should be sent to the address listed for that article, if there is one. Download my pgp (gpg) public key for secure email.

Technical

New content, and old content as I convert it, is in html5, served by Apache2 on Debian Linux. The pages and stylesheet validate and I check them in modern browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, [mobile] Safari) and, occasionally, in other browsers; if they look messed-up in your browser then your browser is broken.

There is no Flash or java here and javascript mainly for the operation of the Google search widgets and the sparse, tasteful Google advertisements. I hope these are not too annoying; they almost pay my hosting expenses.

Most of the site is a web of static pages created by a python program (1175 lines and growing) that processes a collection of notes and articles that I write in xml, using a set of tags that I defined for this purpose (making me another member of that ever enlarging club that has found it convenient to write their own content management system). The program makes heavy use of elementtree to parse the xml, and allows my notes to flow to the front page and appear in the form of news items, to the news feed, and to their own pages and parts of other pages. Anything dynamic on the site uses python on the server, depending on parts of Django and served through mod_wsgi.

I became convinced of the utility of writing in xml, something that I used to consider a horrible idea, by the approach taken by the author of the tbook system for xml authoring and by discovering the pleasure of the text editor vim and its xml support.

In August of 2010 I applied the ideas described in this wonderful article to design my site so that the layout adapts itself to the width of the screen; in this way it's automatically easy to read on both phones and computers. To see how this works, if you're on a computer, shrink the width of your browser window and watch the layout change. That never gets old.

April, 2011: I was very impressed with the techniques described here and am playing with them to generate background textures for these pages.