What is Etherice?


  1. A volatile, highly flammable liquid, C2H5OC2H5
  2. An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium once postulated to fill the voids between matter.
  3. An element, once believed to compose the stars and planets; the heavens.
  1. Liquid frozen solid
  1. A solidified, yet highly volatile cyber-liquid through which enigmas often propagate.
  2. The meaning of life
  3. http://www.etherice.com

Seriously though... Etherice is my personal Website; its purpose is to market my talents, hype my projects, post images and blog entries, and aggregate headlines from my favorite news sites. The graphics are all original, except for some of the tall images that fill the left-side column, which are royalty-free, restriction-free stock images from sxc.hu.

Etherice.com has metamorphasized over the years, and you can see some of the old interfaces here. I used to embed quite a bit of Flash content in my Websites, but I stopped about a year ago. There are two reasons for this; 1) I prefer to use open standards over proprietary ones, and 2) if users do not have the Flash plugin installed or block Flash content then it results in a crippled page. For the same reason I try to keep Javascript usage down to a minimum. Thanks to the magic of CSS, that has become increasingly possible.

The latest version of Etherice, 2.0 Chameleon, is my favorite by far. If you look at any of the old designs, you'll see that everything was overhauled. I rewrote everything and designed new graphics for almost everything. I wanted Etherice to sport a more Web 2.0 like interface, but more importantly I wanted a Website that could showcase a ton of content easily. Etherice can now be viewed as a custom-coded Content Management System (CMS) by yours truly.

One of my favorite features, and one that I think makes Etherice truly unique, is that it changes colors like a Chameleon everytime you visit a page (hence the codename). Users can even set the color of the site by using the color picker in the upper-right corner of the page. I wrote a very clean color theming engine that can be easily modified and customized on a per-page basis. For example, some pages run in "Chameleon mode" in which they change colors based on the context of the request's query string. You'll notice that Mizzou-oriented pages will dynamically theme yellow, black, and gold. Matrix and DreamRemix pages will theme green. The strawberries taste like strawberries. The shnozzberries taste like shnozzberries... you get the idea.

Everything in the new code base is cleanly separated and there is practically zero code redundancy. Therefore, if I want to change something, or customize something, I can isolate it to a single place and those changes propagate throughout the entire CMS. It's quite nice.

Any questions?