This website has been published under various names 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 Mac Book Pro running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Changes to the templates and scripts that power the site are usually previewed locally in Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer (running either inside Fusion or on a Windows PC) in varying combinations, and in roughly that order of preference.

This site’s content is edited almost exclusively in MarsEdit. The only exception to this is that, as far as I know, it isn’t currently possible to edit static pages (i.e., not blog entries; this colophon is a static page) in MarsEdit. I have also used ecto, and don’t really have anything bad to say about it, other than that I currently prefer MarsEdit.

I’ve used SubEthaEdit, and BBEdit is what brought be back to the platform, but my current favorite text editor is TextMate, hands down. For native code I tend to drift back and forth between TextMate and whatever the native IDE is for a given platform (i.e., either Xcode or Visual Studio).

Files are generally shuffled between my machine and the server by either Transmit or SSH/sftp. The idea of Coda appeals to me, but giving up project-wide search just isn’t happening.

Server

The site is runs on WordPress, and usually the most current version of it at that. The current theme (and its predecessor) is mostly custom, a work-in-progress, and isn’t really based on any theme or site in particular. There was a time when the site was running on Movable Type, and the markup structure (if not the overall style) vaguely ties back to how I did things then.

The site is currently running the following WordPress plugins:

There are also two custom plugins; one of them adds the standard WordPress tag cloud as a Widget, and the other alters the WordPress directory structure slightly to account for how I have my server configured. Neither these plugins nor my themes (current or otherwise) are distributed. I don’t consider any of them generally useful enough to bother cleaning up for distribution, and I don’t see this changing. While I am quite happy with Spam Karma 2’s performance, it is at or beyond end-of-life by the original developer, so sometime soon I will replace it with Akismet.

Currently both Google Analytics and Mint are tracking the site’s statistics; Mint was only very recently added, and Google Analytics will sooner or later be phased out. While Google Analytics is free and quite capable, Mint is totally extensible, really doesn’t cost very much for what you get, and is a product of an independent developer, which I like. If you don’t think that’s worth $30, you know where to get Google Analytics.

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 editing my templates), but I don’t do it every time I post something, and that’s what I would have to do to say that my entire site validates.

While I’m generally an advocate of web standards, and try to adhere to them for compatibility with most modern browsers, I am breaking one of the rules and not working particularly hard to rectify it; I’m serving XHTML content with the text/html MIME type, which is increasingly frowned upon. Ultimately, the reason for this is that most of WordPress and WordPress plugins assume XHTML output, and I can’t be bothered to fix it all. I believe I’m following the compatibility guidelines, and Mint requires text/html to function properly. This will probably get fixed eventually, but I don’t really know when.