About the site:

As stated elsehwere, the site was Lilli's, given as her 15th birthday present. She had plans to put her artwork and stories on the site, and did so to a limited extent.

Lilli also wanted the site to conform to certain standards, which meant that it could not be the product of some commercial "site generator" software, and that it needed to have a little "geekiness" to it. She had learned CSS and HTML, and was coding bits of the site in different ways. A recent interest of hers was Python, and she had begun working on a little game program, using renpy, to learn that language. She liked Open Source, and free software, she loved her late-model PowerBook G4, on which she did a lot of her Photoshop drawing (the "Gimp" just didn't quite meet her expectations, even though she tried to use it). The PowerBook was her companion and window to the world.

To represent and honor Lilli's style, this site is hand-coded, using the Smultron editor (www.smultron.org), a free editor for Mac OS X, and uses only hand-coded CSS, HTML, and of course, Python scripts. All the Python scripts are custom for the site, and are a little limited by the version provided by the hosting company (2.7). This is what Lilli was going for, and I can just see her having an "Aha" moment when she grokked the way that the Python gets integrated with the HTML. That was something so special about her - how she would struggle to solve a problem and then when she saw the solution, or was given a hint, she would have this big smile and an "Aha!", as the whole logic came clear and was then forever after a part of her lexicon.

Yet to come is incorporating some of Lilli's artistic developments into the site. I have found some graphics for buttons that will go into the navigation menu, and at the time that I incorporate those, we will probably change the css as well. It is not fancy, but it is meant to be clean, functional, and uncluttered.


Lilli Manis