I work as a web developer implementing other people's visual ideas. Sometimes it bothers me that my job is not more creative, but other times I appreciate that my task is relatively simple and emotionally uncomplicated. I tend to absorb elements from designs that I like at work and adopt them for use in this, my one and only personal site.

The current layout is reminiscent of the T-Mobile site, which I built a few components for last year. I enjoyed the long easy lines and the way pages have a definite solid footer on which to rest. Sometimes I think the design is too sharp-edged but then every time I start using beveled corners the layout begins to look more important than the content. The Kallisti logo is rendered in Boberia (from Linotype). The logotype is from David Hirmes' Crop Circle Dingbats.

The color palette, consisting primarily of purple combined with neutral grays and whites, has recently (April 2003) expanded to include a tint of pure blue. I added it after watching the sun go down behind the Olympic mountains outside my window. Just when the sky is about to be completely dark, it turns this most amazing shade of smoky azure. I wanted to capture some sense of it on my website.

It has been several years now that I have dwelled in lavender and I am a little tired of it. One of the last pages I designed (my Reading List) departs from the purple and uses warmer colors in its attempt to evoke a parchment-like feeling. The page explaining why this site is named "Kallisti" wanted to be dark, to keep the image from punching a hole in the canvas of the screen. I really enjoy the chiaroscuro aspects of working with dark backgrounds and there will probably be more of them appearing on the site soon.

Imagery is borrowed liberally from public domain sources, or from my own work. I also have pieces by favorite artists on some of my pages; authorship is always credited somewhere, usually in the footer. The type on these pages is rendered in either Verdana or Georgia, two fonts by Matthew Carter (hinted by Thomas Rickner) which were created especially for viewing on computer screens.

The functionality of this site is an amalgamation of other people's code; I am not a programmer, and can only piece together what others have done to serve my own aims. Luckily, there is a lot of free software out there. A canonical list of the packages the site uses would be too tedious to compile; attributions are always made on the footer of the relevant pages.

The menu system (Cascading Popup Menus v5.2) was written by Angus Turnbull of TwinHelix Designs. He provides it for free to the general public but askes for either attribution or a monetary donation. I have provided both, since the code is some of the best I've ever seen written for the web, working flawlessly in every browser I know. I'm really excited about it since it will let me grow my site free of the worry of stranding content.

The HTML is headed in the direction of XHTML compliance. I doubt it will ever be formatted via XSLT but CSS is used extensively (although I use tables unashamedly for layout purposes). Most of the pages make use of PHP as a server-side programming language, although I prefer Perl for some things. I use a text editor and Photoshop. Sometimes I wish I'd picked up a taste for Dreamweaver since I can see that doing a design visually before one thinks very much about code leads to some really stunning and unique web sites. But I can't seem to help doing it from the other direction: content first and then its context.

This site is hosted by PHP Webhosting; I have been with them for almost five years now and recommend them highly to anyone looking for a competent, affordable web host. Their service has been astonishingly reliable. They aren't extremely responsive, but then they don't bug me much either.

My husband has helped nurture this site. A software and network engineer, he is responsible for several custom scripts, including the referral log parser and an automated backup function, and he has been there for me countless times when I ended up at the wrong end of a telnet prompt.

If you're still with me this far, you might be interested in visiting my journal.