About this site

Updated: Nov 26, 2006. Add a comment!

1. Who are you and what’s this about?

I’m a web developer living in Bucharest, Romania. I’ve taken an interest in the Web back around 1995, when I learned HTML and put together my first homepage. The Web has managed to keep me interested and on the edge ever since, which is the best anyone could ask from their line of work.

I use this site to publish all kinds of thoughts and findings related to the Web and Web development. I come across lots of interesting things almost daily. I think it would be a pity not to share at least some of them.

This site also gives me a chance for me to experiment with WordPress and try out Web development and design ideas.

2. How can I contact you?

See the contact page.

3. A word of apology in advance

Please take whatever you read on this site with a grain of salt. I’m human, and I don’t consider myself an expert on anything. I still have much to learn. I make mistakes, I learn, I change my mind. Don’t take anything I’ve written here at absolute value — I’ve hopefully evolved, even a tiny bit, since it was written. Use your own better judgement too.

4. Additional credits

The emoticons were created by Beccary.

The orange feed icon is used courtesy of Mozilla Foundation. Get your own full pack at FeedIcons.

The icons used in the note, warning, tip and caution boxes, as well as on the software page, were created by the Tango Project.

Many thanks to the creators of WordPress and of the various plugins I’m using.

5. What does “ars aranea” mean?

It’s in Latin. “Ars” means “art”, and “aranea” means “spider’s web”. It’s a play on words regarding web development and the World Wide Web: “the art of the spider’s web”, if you will.

Before you mention that it’s spelled wrong, I already know. It’s supposed to be spelled “ars araneae”, according to my feeble knowledge of Latin and this. But I had to think of my visitors. Having “eae” in the name of the site doesn’t exactly help people remember it or find it easily. So please overlook it.

How you pronounce it: “aars aa•rah•neh•aa” (with the emphasys on “neh”.)

Apparently “aranea” and “araneae” also refer to types (or classes) of spiders. There’s nothing about spiders on this website, other than perhaps in the Web sense.

6. What does the favicon logo stand for?

The favicon (the small icon associated with this site in your browser’s address bar, on tabs or in bookmarks) contains two capital “A” letters, which stand for “Ars Aranea”. The font I used is “Zamolxis II”, which is part of a free package containing several Romanian archaic fonts used in old parchments and books.

7. Which CMS engine are you using?

I use WordPress, which is probably one of the best blog engines out there right now. It’s very flexible and has a sensible implementation. It allows one to customize it almost indefinitely without touching the core engine, only with dynamic themes and plugins. If you take a tour of some WordPress-based sites you’ll see what I mean.

I chose a blog engine because it fits my needs perfectly. It allows me to publish various things that cross my interest freely, and allows for time- and category-based navigation. Not to mention all the added bonuses, like built-in search, RSS, allowing visitors to leave feedback, or expanding the functionality very quickly thanks to ready-made code written by the WordPress community.

8. I like this WordPress theme, what it is?

It’s called Blumenthol. I’ve made it from scratch and I’m afraid it’s not available for download, for two reasons.

First, I think it’s good to give a site its own visual identity. If everybody starts using this design then mine will be just one of several sites looking the same. Not that it’s terribly original or anything, but at least I gave it an honest shot.

Second, I constantly modify it to work with hacked plugins and and experimental functionality, so it probably wouldn’t be of much use to anybody else anyway.

9. Why are you using tables to implement this layout?

If you ask because you honestly believe I’d gain something from pure CSS, read on. If you ask because you like to nitpick and think that all websites absolutely MUST use pure CSS, please go away.

I use tables because I want the content column to be as big as possible and the sidebar column to be as small as needed, without using fixed widths or fixed margins, without faking columns with backgrounds, without having to deal with overflow issues, without having to worry about cross-browser compatibility and so on.

I know that <div>’s and CSS can be used to achieve a very similar-looking design. But I’m not a CSS guru so I can’t come up with the precise way to do that in 5 minutes. If I ever get a day with absolutely nothing else to do I promise I’ll look into converting to pure CSS, hell, I’ll try XHTML Strict too. But I have other things to do until then and in the meantime tables work very well.