Wesley's Tool-Box

The first time I logged online was back in 1996, via the then-popular but now-defunct Nownuri online service. Later that year, I was able to connect to the Internet and create my own web page, hosted on another service provider's server. Internet Archives has retained a snapshot from 1999. It was the direct predecessor to this website, and it persisted until 2001 when I registered the Tool-Box.info domain, changed the blog's name to what it is now, and overhauled the design.

Then in 2005, the website was overhauled once again in order to use the Serendipity Weblog System (s9y), a PHP-based content management system, running on my home Mac mini computer. This system has been able to meet all my needs, so the basic framework has remained the same for the past 11 years. Only the updates to the software and hardware came and went in between.

When the current website was initially designed, I targeted the screen resolution of 800x600, which was more or less the minimum people's computers could do at the time. It has worked okay over the years, but the general horizontal resolution for the desktop computers had increased more than twofold, while the mobile devices often has less than half the targeted resolution even as its usage base skyrocketed. So the website's design could not serve either of the platform all that well.

This meant that I needed to redo the website design. I had considered creating a separate design for the mobile devices, but the existing solutions did not work as well as I hoped. Then I decided to try using a new theme included in the recent versions of s9y called "Next" which used the so-called "responsive web design." The theme automatically and dynamically adjusts the layout of the site content based on the screen size, which meant that I only need to keep a single theme and don't have to fiddle with web browser detection. This was the direction I wanted to take, so I got to work.

Throughout the weekend, I analyzed the ins and outs of the theme, then I made some changes to the style sheets and the template files to create a faithful successor to the original Tool-Box.info design. The graphics assets were updated or recreated to better work in multiple resolutions. If you accessed this website yesterday or the day before, you'll probably have noticed the ongoing changes. That work is now done.

Going forward, I hope the new design serves the needs of the visitors for the next decade well. The photos and the Toon-Box web toon that I upload will be in a higher resolution starting today to suit the new design, too. I have checked that the website works fine with modern web browsers with HTML5 support, for both desktop and mobile. But if you see any weird problems, feel free to notify me via the comments.