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KynosargesWelcome to the gymnasion! This is the personal website of Christoph Nahr. Visit the following index pages or use the sidebar menu to show categorized lists of content pages.
Here’s some meta-information on the website and weblog:
This website is accessible through two domains, kynosarges.org and kynosarges.de. Both point to the same files and can be used interchangeably. See below for the history behind these twin domains.
On screens wider than 650 CSS pixels, you’ll see a sidebar menu to the left. It’s implemented in pure CSS 2.1 and uses hover functionality. Its behavior differs depending on your input method.
The pop-up submenus are based on the examples at Claire Campbell’s tanfa CSS. They should work on Mobile Safari and all current desktop browsers. Internet Explorer 7 may work, depending on your settings. IE6 and earlier are not supported – please upgrade your browser!
On a related note, several pages contain tables, images, or listings that are wrapped in automatically resizing scroll boxes. This feature requires JavaScript and is described here. Mobile browsers won’t show scroll bars on tables that don’t fit the viewport, but you can still scroll them by swiping left and right.
Here’s how you can keep up with Kynosarges contents and get in touch with me. Since March 2012 all website news and status updates appear on the Kynosarges weblog. You can subscribe to the associated newsfeed, or follow me on Twitter where I tweet links to new and updated weblog posts.
Kynosarges Weblog — Website news & ramblings (complete archive)
Kynosarges Newsfeed — Weblog subscription feed in RSS format
E-mail Christoph Nahr — Send your comments & questions
@ChrisNahr on Twitter — Weblog posts & many other links
Christoph Nahr on Google+ — Mostly a subset of my Twitter feedYou can post feedback and contact me at any of these services. Moreover, the “Weblog” link at the bottom of most website pages points to the latest related weblog entry. Feel free to leave comments there.
The Κυνοσαργες (Kynosarges) was an ancient Greek gymnasion dedicated to Herakles, situated in the demos Diomeia outside the walls of Athens. It was the place of education for those Athenian boys who did not enjoy full citizenship. Antisthenes (445–360 BC), student of Socrates and founder of the cynic school of philosophy, taught at the Kynosarges. The most famous cynic was Diogenes of Sinope (412–323 BC), allegedly residing in an empty barrel and subject of countless anecdotes.
Addendum 1 June 2004: I am pleased to discover that Kynosarges was also the title of a short-lived literary magazine whose only issue was published in Berlin anno 1802. Otherwise the name appears to have seen little use since ancient times, at least with the “K” spelling.
The Kynosarges website was established in 1999 – not quite so ancient as its namesake but still pretty old compared to most of the Internet! I wanted a distinctive domain name to host my first small game project, Star Chess. Since then the website has grown organically with all kinds of code, links, and articles which I found interesting or useful enough to share.
Addendum April 2012: Originally I had been posting all website news directly on this page, deleting old news periodically when the list got too long. Last month I finally got more organized and started posting updates on the services linked above (WordPress, Twitter, Google+). So you won’t find any updates older than March 2012 there, in case you were wondering.
As a German resident I got a free .de domain from my ISP, so that’s where Kynosarges started out. However, this website is neither written in German nor specific to Germany, and it quickly acquired a global audience (however small). So I registered the kynosarges.org alias in June 2011 and have been using it in public URLs ever since, although the .de variant will remain valid as well.
An amusing incident in June 2011 provided additional incentive for the .org alias. Chinese domain hunters were evidently targeting foreign website names at random – including mine! They had only squatted on local domains such as kynosarges.cn at that point, but I decided to take preemptive action before anyone else could grab kynosarges.org.
