That's right. I finally created a real home page to replace the "click here to see my weblog" page. The new home page will complement, not replace, my weblog by giving me a spot for less frequently changing content. I wanted a place to share software, photos, or links without having them scroll off the bottom of my weblog into archive oblivion.

This isn't the first JoshChristie.com home page. Some of you may remember "JoshChristie.com: The next dot com sensation" which was the name of my site during college and, as the tongue-in-cheek name suggests, during the dot com boom. That site used ASP, a VB COM middle tier, and an Access database to share lots of photo albums, info about me, my class schedules, my resume, random quotes, and polls. The layout of that site was created using tables, nested tables, clear gifs, and more tables. It eventually degenerated into a convoluted HTML and ASP spaghetti code mix that was hard for me to maintain and update.

This time around I'm trying to stick to a pure CSS diet without tables, clear gifs, and other such layout tricks. This goal has required me to break out the old DHTML book on several occasions -- I'm thankful I can finally ignore all the sections comparing IE 4.0 and Netscape 4's lack of support or mangling of various CSS properties.

Overall, I've been impressed with how nice a pure CSS layout can be. Once I got the hang of it, I felt like I had much more control over how the page looked. It was certainly much easier to make changes with CSS than if I had to update a bunch of nested TABLE and TD elements. The HTML is in fact so simple that this page might turn into my first XHTML experiment, too.

There's not much content posted yet, so let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to see. Photo albums, .NET code samples, hobbies, AVR microcontroller info, more pictures of me with my head in the clouds?