This design of the website has been in use since July 2008 and was developed because the older PHP + MySQL integrated features were too annoying to maintain. In theory having a central database would still make things like version tracking and program management easy but in practice I grew lazy about updating the software on this site due to the database maintenance that it required.

The current version of this website uses HTML 4.01 and some PHP to basically act as a macro system for HTML. In addition CSS is used extensively, including a wee bit of proposed but not standardized CSS. In any event the web site should show up fine at least even if your browser does not support all the CSS used.

The main page has a sidebar on the left with various links. The layout of the whole page is a fluid layout which means that all the horizontal space of your web browser can be used and the site resizes itself in the event there is not enough width (up to the size of the sidebar, that is).

To allow the sidebar to be placed after the content in the raw HTML, a technique was used to give the main content a negative left margin which "sucks up" the sidebar. The technique was described in June 2004 by Ryan Brill and works as good as ever even today.

To make the entries in the sidebar itself I simply used an unordered list with li elements. This allows for the negative first-line handing indent which then allows me to use a fairly narrow sidebar. This technique is fairly popular and has many good descriptions which you can search for.

Beyond that I have started signing tarballs that I release with my normal GPG key, which you can find at my contact page. The PHP templating code will automatically make the digital signature available for applications which have one.

I'm not at all good with graphics and color schemes. So I borrowed a background from squidfingers.com and edited the background to reduce the contrast between the two colors to make it more useful as a background. I then based the colors for text off of that. It is a good rule of thumb to always set foreground and background colors in pairs. You never know when someone will visit your site with a light-on-dark colorscheme for instance so if you've changed your text color and forgot to ensure that the background is light then your visitors will have trouble reading your site.

In the future I'd like to look into an easier way to maintain lists of applications and releases without having to build anything (or much) myself. But for now purinchu 2.0 will hopefully suffice just fine.

Note that things like the blog are unaffected by my website design, this is just for my stuff.