ldots.org
About ldots.org

About ldots.org

ldots.org is my website. I am Michael JasonSmith, a Ph.D student studying Computer Science at the University of Canterbury. My thesis keeps me busy, but I still have time to occasionally post pages on ldots.

The Name

The name ldots comes from a command used in the LaTeX typesetting system. To quote the LaTeX Project:

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system, with features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

LaTeX is written in plain text, like xml or html but with \ and {} characters rather than the < and > tags that litter xml and html. The following is part of a document written using LaTeX.

\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}

Time is a compelling mechanism to organise documents and is an
effective cue to document retrieval.
There are three aspects to time that make it a compelling document
organisation mechanism.
\begin{enumerate}
\item Time is pervasive; every event occurs at a particular date,
  and everything is subject to ageing.
  The representation of dates and ageing of documents in a computer
  system is externally-consistent with how dates are represented and
  documents age outside the system.
\item The user does not have to put effort into organising documents
  by time, as documents can be given timestamps automatically.
  Compare this to traditional filenames and folders where the user
  must manually place the documentation in the correct folder, and
  create a unique (and meaningful) name.
\item People are easily able to remember the order of
  events~\cite{michon72:processing_of_temporal_information}.
  This should allow easy retrieval of documents that were seen
  recently as order can be used as a cue for retrieval of
  temporally-ordered documents.
  For example, people should be easily able to retrieve the document
  that was viewed before lunch yesterday.
  Unfortunately people find it difficult to remember precisely
  \emph{when} and event occurred so documents that were seen in the
  distant past may be difficult to find.
\end{enumerate}

I write a lot of LaTeX as part of my thesis (from which the above code is an excerpt) and when I write email messages I occasionally break into LaTeX, often writing \ldots instead of ellipsis (…). My friend Nigel Campbell brought me ldots.org for a present, and the rest, as they say, is history\ldots

The Logo

The logo I use is a series of interconnecting question-marks.

The question-marks represent my questioning nature (and form an oblique reference to Dr Who).
The Futura font was used to draw the question-marks because I find Futura aesthetically pleasing.
The orange dots represent my hair-colour.

The logo was drawn in an idle moment using The GIMP, and is stored as a PNG.

The Site

The Website is hosted by my good friends at iOpen on a Zope application server. I use very few of the advanced features of Zope, just a bit of fanciness to implement the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page, and the automatic insertion of the footer.

The Pages

The pages are written in XHTML 1.0 Strict. I could have used HTML 4, but few browsers have problems with xhtml and I find it easier to write in xml because all tags must be closed, so I do not have to remember which tags to close and which ones to leave open.

Normally I write the pages using the XEmacs text editor, and load them into Zope using the Cadaver WebDAV Client. Once loaded, the pages are edited to include the standard header and footer, then I am done!

The Style

The style of ldots.org is fairly simple for two reasons:

I am a fan of modernism, and
I have poor taste in colours.

As a result, the style tries to be distinctive while only using black and white and not using many images. The basic layout is based on any number of technical manuals, with bold headings hanging to the left of the text. A monospaced font is used as the main heading font to make ldots.org more distinctive.

The style is implemented in a single stylesheet written in CSS 2. The hanging headers are created by setting the left-hand margin for the page to 10%, and making the left-hand margin for the headings -10%. I use the generic serif, monospace, and sans-serf typefaces that are set in your browser; I do not know what fonts you have installed on your computer, and I would never be so presumptuous as to say that my taste in typefaces is better than yours. However, if you are interested my default fonts are as follows.

Default typefaces used by Michael.
Generic Family	Used Typeface
Serif	Bitstream Vera Serif
Sans	Bitstream Vera Sans
Monospace	ITC American Typewriter

(I am aware that American Typewriter is not a monospace font; it looks good anyway!)

The technical guides differ slightly from the other pages on ldots.org. I do this mainly to stop confusion, so they are not confused with the personal pages. The main stylistic difference is with the section headings:

A serif font is used, instead of a monospace font,
There is a "thin solid black" line under each heading, and
There are section numbers at the start of each heading.

The stylesheet that is used for the technical guides imports the basic layout from the main stylesheet. Unfortunately, section numbering does not work in browsers based on the the Gecko rendering engine so you will have to rely on Opera if you want to see ldots.org in its full glory!

The Metadata

While I was feeling all bleeding edge by using xhtml 1 and css 2, I decided to go the whole hog and add some metadata in rdf format. (Metadata is data about data, such as this page.)

The metadata file is made up of three parts. The first part describes ldots.org using Dublin Core Metadata terms. The second describes me, and is written using the foaf rdf vocabulary. The final part describes the copyright and licence information, using the vocabulary from Creative Commons.

One use of the rdf metadata is finding out people I know that run their own Web sites. This is similar to Orkut, but more open.

The Licence

The Advertisements

The advertisements on ldots, such as the one on the right, are provided by Google AdSense. For now, I am using them to see what happens, rather than as a serious attempt to earn money.

My personal pages — such as my photos and wedding speeches — do not have ads because I put those pages up for love, not profit. So currently only the technical pages have ads. This also works out well for Google as the technical pages are higher volume than the personal pages :)