Simon Willison’s Weblog

More lecture notes

As you can see, I’ve posted some more lecture notes. The second set uses a HTML entities to display greek letters, as listed on this page of the HTML 4.0 recommendation.

I’ve been thinking about various ways of keeping my lecture notes off the front page and out of the way of people who come here for web development related content. My preferred idea at the moment is to replace the current category system (which is in desperate need of an overhaul anyway) with a system of hierarchical categories instead. Categories will be nested within each other—for example, the PHP category will be nested inside the Server-Side Development category. There will be three top-level categories: Web Development, Computer Science and Student Life. The front page of this site will carry only categories contained within Web Development, while the Computer Science and Student Life hierarchies will have separate index pages. The archive pages will contain content from all categories, so only the index pages (and syndication feeds) will serve different content.

There are still a few things I need to iron out with this approach; some categories seem to fit in more than one parent category (PHP is both a programming language and an open source project for example) and having a single archive for all three topic trees could cause confusion for people following permalinks.