To modernize the appearance of my site a little bit, I've now added a dark mode!
It's triggered by your device's color scheme, so if you've enabled a dark theme on your PC, smartphone, tablet, etch-a-sketch, or whatever you're using to browse this site, you should see the dark version of this site. There is currently no way to trigger it manually, so a browser that supports this is required (fortunately, that's pretty much all modern browsers).
If you're not seeing it, you may have to force reload the stylesheet for this site. On PC, you can do this by pressing CTRL-F5 on this page. On mobile, the only way I'm aware of is to completely clear your browser's cache.
I know I don't exactly do much with this site anymore, but I did recently make some small changes.
Primarily, I've reorganized some of the outdated content (like the stuff related to Channel 9) so it's less prominent. I've also updated the information for Ookii.Dialogs to link to the forked project on GitHub. My own version isn't kept up to date, so most people looking for Ookii.Dialogs should probably be using that version instead (the people who are doing this are awesome, by the way, for keeping this project alive).
Oh, and the site now supports https, thanks to Azure's free SSL/TLS certificates.
Ookii.org now has a new home! It's the same site as always, except now it's hosted on Microsoft Azure. This shouldn't make any difference for you, and it probably won't mean this blog will get any more active, but all the existing content is still there.
Due to the very large volume of spam comments this site receives despite efforts on my part to block them (recaptcha is apparently completely useless), I'm unfortunately forced to disable comments on all posts on this site.
If you wish to contact me about anything pertaining to this site, please use Twitter instead.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
As you can see, Ookii.org has gotten a revamp. Now you may wonder, why make such a radical update to a site when the content doesn't change that often? The main reason is that I wanted to get my hands dirty with some modern web technology.
While web development has never been particularly important to me, it was something I knew how to do and I kept somewhat up-to-date with. This dates back to making the site for my high school (at the time in Frontpage). However, as I'd been busy with my Ph.D. in Japan, I had very little time to keep up to date with stuff I didn't have any need to use in my research. Now that I've finished and haven't started my new job yet, it was the ideal time to brush up a little.
Back when I started this site, I wrote it in ASP.NET 2.0. I hand-rolled an AJAX library, because jQuery was years from being invented and actually AJAX support in websites wasn't all that common yet. The AJAX parts of the site used web services that returned data in XML, because no one had thought to start using JSON yet either. "Mobile browsers" at the time meant IE for Windows Mobile, which didn't support script at all and was barely on par with IE6 on the desktop otherwise. And speaking of IE6, supporting that was still very much a priority at the time.
But things have changed, and the goal was to re-familiarize myself with the state of the art. So this site is written in ASP.NET MVC 4, using the Entity Framework for data access. On the client, it uses HTML5 and CSS3, with scripts utilizing jQuery and a few related libraries. The site now has a responsive layout thanks to Zurb Foundation (try it: resize your browser window and watch the layout change), which has the side-effect of making it much more friendly for mobile devices. I've also used Knockout.
I have to say I was surprised at how much web programming has changed. ASP.NET MVC is light-years beyond the old web forms. Not only are the frameworks much better and the HTML/CSS much cleaner (at least, as long as you only target modern browsers), the tooling (in the form of Visual Studio 2012 in my case) also has improved tremendously.
Besides just redesigning the layout, I've also made a new front page that de-emphasizes the blog a little (since I don't update it that often), and instead provides a few more useful links as well as news about my Let's Plays from the associated Twitter account.
Note that not everything uses the new layout. Currently, only the blog has been updated. I intend to move other sections of the site to the new layout over time.
Let me know what you think, or if you find something that's broken.
Subscribe