My name is Rob Walsh. Unfortunately, that name is so common as to be nearly useless as a unique identifier on the Internet. (There are 4 entries for "Robert J Walsh" in my local White Pages alone -- Don't even bother with a general Google search.) "Outlawdrake", on the other hand, is unique as far as I know, so I use that handle extensively online. The Misc page explains why I chose it and a little more about who I am, and why I set up this site.

There isn't as much here as I would like, and it's not as polished as I would like, but then I have grandiose ideas. Please wander around and let me know what you think. This site is primarily static, textual, and archival content (as well as being an experimental platform that I completely control). You'll see more up to date and frequent output on Twitter, Facebook, and my Blog. I post all my pictures to Picasa or Facebook Photos. My Google Profile has the canonical list of places I call "mine".

August 2010: Major site changes, in both layout and underlying structure. HTML has been simplified so it renders well on smartphones and is seen as HTML5 rather than XHTML (including the use of some CSS3 features), and work finally begun to facilitate a simple content management system. The local photo album has been removed. Livejournal has been deprecated in favor of Blogger; the old entries there will be archived here eventually. The old home page has been saved for posterity.

November 2005: All of the primary pages have been converted to XHML 1.0 Strict and cleaned up, and the CSS and layout tweaked a little. The links page has been converted to an XBEL XML file, but I've decided to stick with 'class'-ified XHTML for the archived content. TEI looks cool, but the frustration of trying (and failing) to get emacs nxml-mode to recognize a new RelaxNG schema proved to be too much, and the added overhead of XSLT just isn't worth it right now.

August 2004: I updated the script that scales the pictures. The thumbnails are now scaled to a consistent size regardless of orientation, and the scaled pics are now 50% of the original. (Before they were scaled to 192 and 640 pixels wide, respectively.)

June 2004: I'll be updating my Livejournal more regularly with esssays and rants, but I'm thinking about archiving at least some of them here, since I much prefer writing in emacs.

March 2004: I've been playing with XML and XSLT lately (specifically, mod_xslt for Apache 2), and I'm really excited by the possibilities it opens up. At the very least, I'll be converting the articles on this site to XML.

January 2004: Upgraded to Apache 2 and moved to a new server (which forced incompatible changes in the photo album handler).

December 2003: Moved a lot of new bookmarks to the links page.

October 2003: Redesigned the pages using pretty boxes (and adjusted the colors a little). I had been resisting that (sticking to as little fluff as possible), but the old look got to be too plain. Credit goes to Sev for inspiring the new look. (Not to mention that she has some interesting content on her site.)