Welcome to the NI3 weblog, a new face to Dann Sheridan's Weblog and the X-Log. NI3 is the name of the company I incorporated prior to joining my current employer, since I didn't know which direction I was headed at the time. NI3 stands for "the net result of imagination, innovation, and investment." NI3 also happens to the chemical compound known as nitrogen triiodide, one of the world's most powerful contact explosives. I thought that the business connotation I created combined with the physical science could lend itself to some fun with words in marketing my services. NI3 is on ice for the time being as a company, but I paid for a logo and design earlier this year and it seems a waste to let it gather dust on my hard drive.
I still have some work to do here, but it is close enough to being complete that I wanted to launch the design before going back to work tomorrow. I still need to build a master archives page, add some meat to the distributed computing section, and create a formal Radio theme based on this design. I also want to start writing essays on distributed computing, storage, and security.
This theme is completely CSS based. All of the CSS files are stored outside of Radio. This isn't the best solution and I will probably fix it moving forward. Storing the CSS files in the Gems folder and/or the theme database table to be rendered with the site would be a better, more portable solution. I will play with this later. I only had to modify two macros in order to get the Radio inline with this design: editorsOnlyMenu and adminMenu. The drawCalendar macro presented some interesting challenges, but I ultimately created replacement style classes so I didn't have to touch the UserLand code. I will write a story about this effort and include links to the formal theme and modified macros over the next couple of days.
