Hacking

I am finally getting some old, ugly web sites wrapped up, so I can work on my shiny new web site for the State of Kansas so-called Geo Portal.

I've been wanting to re-do the web site associated with my "Web Administrator" title since I laid eyes on it, but I've been working on other web sites since I started here, and the field is only new clearing.

This is the old site: www.kansasgis.org. Aside from some heinous code (try sending that sucker through the W3C Validator!), it is very dated, suffers from a design that is cluttered with too many fonts, its terminology is all specific to GIS geeks rather than the lay-person trying to find the free data offered by the state, and it is simply unreadable on IE6 at 800 x 600 resolution - a frightening majority of the users out there.

So, I'm finally making progress on the new site (which, I must admit, I haven't checked on IE6 yet), and it's pulling together rather nicely.

I stole a very nice solution for finding element locations on a page from this site, and was able to make definitions hover under the underlined text. That affect is so cool. (But I really have to check it in IE6).

The next fun thing will be embedding some of our map caches into a new catalog layout.

Looking forward to some seriously cool coding in the near future makes the darkening days of late fall, and the biting chill of winter, seem completely insignificant.

I love my job.