About These Pages

Browser Recommendations:

• Browser with support for cascading style sheets ver. 1 (CSS1)
• Full support for PNG images.

I personally recommend that you use Mozilla to view these pages. It is the most standards compliant browser available at this time. You may also view these pages using recent versions of internet explorer, but it doesn't fully/properly support standards such as CSS and it doesn't handle transparency in PNG images. These pages should also be viewable with Opera or Konqueror.

These pages actually work extremely well in Lynx (I was surprised). Although, I don't think the image galleries will be very entertaining ;-).

How these pages were developed

CSS

I chose to use CSS when developing these pages. This let me achieve many effects that simply aren't possible with traditional HTML. CSS's also let me layout the pages without resorting to a mess of nested tables. Finally, CSS's actually make page loading faster by moving some standard formatting code into external CSS files that only need to be loaded once.

Server side scripting

To keep my pages easily maintainable I used a web scripting language called PHP. PHP makes it easy to avoid replicating identical HTML in each pages. For example, the navigation bar and copywrite notice are all generate by PHP functions.

Image Manipulation

I used a variety of tools to manipulate images for these pages.

• Gimp - I used the Gimp to edit, convert, and create many of the images.
• Album - I used a fantastic perl script called album to generate the image galleries on my pages. Album automatically creates thumbnails and generates webpages using supplied image captions. It is also "themeable". I modified an existing theme to create a theme that matched the look of my site.
• Vim - I used my favourite text editor, Vim, to edit all of my webpages. If you haven't tried out Vim yet, be sure to give it a shot!

Syntax Highlighting

I used Beautifier (written in PHP) to do all the syntax highlighting for source code on my site.

Hosting

I am currently hosting my site on the SDF Public Access Unix System. I highly recommend using their systems if you are comfortable with (or interested in learning) Unix. For more information on becoming a member and donating to SDF, please visit this page.