Lachlan Hetherton

One of the reasons I put this site together was to help me keep track of things I learn about software development. Unsurprisingly, the process of redesigning and redeploying my website has been a good opportunity to update my knowledge of HTML and CSS. Of course, since this website is a personal project, I have a few advantages compared to an important business project:

• I don't have to worry about scalability, since I expect there will be at most 5 readers of this blog. I'll be very pleased if I turn out to be wrong about this point.
• I don't have to worry about IE6, since I don't care if users of that browser can read my site. This means I can focus on learning about HTML5, and avoid dicking around with IE specific hacks.

To expand on the second point slightly, what I was actually hoping I could do was keep my HTML as pure content, and use pure CSS to control the site appearance. I figured that if I could keep the design simple enough, surely I wouldn't need to ruin my HTML by putting in non-content elements for the purposes of getting content to appear where I want it to.

I was wrong.

It turns out that forcing a footer to stick to the bottom of a mostly empty page is tricky to do without Javascript. It's not especially difficult, but the solution certainly doesn't conform to my idealised vision of keeping the content/presentation separate. I'd be very interested to hear from some full-time web developers about how they feel about these kinds of things - is it better to use a bit of Javascript for something like this in order to avoid this kind of coupling?

If you're interested in the technique, there's a good write-up of how it works here.

Hi there! As you may have guessed by the giant text at the top of the screen, I'm Lachlan and this is my website. It's taken me quite a while - much longer than I would have liked - to get the thing ready. The site itself has been ready in a basic form for about 3 months now, I just didn't want to spend my evenings after work debugging the thing on dreamhost.

This is the second iteration of my website, but the first I've actually put up on my own domain. Instead of using Wordpress this time, I decided to implement a basic blog using Python and Django, since I've used these for projects in the past and I don't need half the features that Wordpress gives me. Also I'd pick Python over PHP any day of the week, but that's just me. Anyway, I hope that in time, this site will be filled with some relatively interesting posts, as well as a few links to some interesting little site-projects I hack up. For now, all I will say is "Welcome" and "Stay tuned!"