I have been involved with several personal and professional visual updates recently, most by the skilled hands of Travis Oakes. This has included a company site redesign, software redesign, this site's redesign, my guild's illustration, and more. However, one of the most personal to me is the updates to my boys' sites. 

This will follow several changes, between a company redesign, name change, and direction change, and a move from Windows-based development to Apple-based development including a move of all web sites from .NET to Ruby. But in the end my boys will have a new virtual home for me to share with family and friends.

Every so often it's good to take a break. And then there's something that drives me to take that break time and make something lasting out of it. 

There is something about the structure of XML that just speaks to me. Perhaps it's the layout or the hierarchy or the fact that everything is based on defined rules, but it speaks to me. And so, I created a small web site for a group of friends that play World of Warcraft online. 

The site consists of a home page, showing an anime illustration of the founding members' main characters, and a roster. The roster is dynamically populated by using a C# web client to connect to the World of Warcraft armory, pull the raw XML, and do a mashup with a guild definition XML file. The guild definition file is validated against an XSD and then the final XML is transformed with an XLST to bring alive the roster available today. Read more