Colophon

This website has been published under various names and URLs on and off since 2003. The current iteration doesn’t really have a name separate from one of my online pseudonyms, so I’ll refer to it as the site or something similar on this page and, for that matter, most of the rest of the site.

Desktop

My primary machine is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). My default browser these days is Safari, so the site is most likely to look how I intended if you are also using Safari. That being said, any standards-compliant browser should do a good job presenting this mess to you.

Most of the site’s content is edited in MarsEdit, although I also use the web interface and various iPhone clients from time to time as well. I used to use ecto, and I don’t really have anything bad to say about it, other than that I currently prefer MarsEdit.

My text editor of choice varies over time — but my current favorite is TextMate. I’ve also used SubEthaEdit, and BBEdit is what brought me back to the platform after having left so long ago. For native code, I switch between the native IDE for the platform (i.e., Xcode for Mac OS X and iPhone OS, and Visual Studio for Windows) and TextMate.

Files are generally shuffled between my machine and various servers by either Transmit or SSH/sftp. The idea of Coda appeals to me, but not enough so that I’ve actually tried it.

Server

This site runs on WordPress, and generally the most current version of it. The current theme is a custom Thematic child template. There’s a long series of preceding, entirely custom themes that I’ve used, none of which were all that exciting. There was a time when the site was running on Movable Type, and until I switched to Thematic, the markup vaguely tied back to how I did things back then.

The site uses the following WordPress plugins, in no particular order:

All of my content is written in Markdown. I have a single custom plugin that uses Maruku to process the Markdown into HTML, and then uses Pygments to highlight any code blocks present. Once I get the code cleaned up a bit, I intend to release the plugin in the WordPress Plugins Directory.

If you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that I’m running plugins to incorporate two different analytics engines — Google Analytics and Mint. Google Analytics is free, and has a lot of stuff in it, and Mint is inexpensive and totally extensible.

Web Standards

This site is presented in XHTML and CSS. I do validate various pages on my site from time to time (mostly when I’m messing with my templates and stylesheets), and as far as I know everything validates most of the time. The major exception is when I post an embedded video from somewhere, because the lump of code involved is almost never valid, and I can’t always be bothered cleaning it up.

While I’m making exceptions, there is one rule that I’m ignoring for convenience — I’m serving XHTML content with the text/html MIME type, which is increasingly frowned upon. Ultimately the reason for this is that much of WordPress and its associated plugins assume XHTML output, and Mint requires the text/html MIME type to function properly. As far as I know, I’m following the compatibility guidelines everywhere, so there is that at least.

Header Image

Earthrise was taken from lunar orbit on December 24, 1968. While it is generally presented with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo, it was taken with the lunar surface to the right — which by amazing coincidence is the orientation that most easily fits into my header block. Earthrise is in the public domain, per NASA policy. As far as I’m concerned, its one of the most important photographs ever taken.