A Little Bit of History

This website’s first incarnation appeared in March 2004 on Geocities. It was a horrible hodgepodge that looked like it had been created by someone who learned HTML in about seven days. That’s because it I was someone who learned HTML in about seven days.

For the next several months, I blissfully committed all the cardinal sins. I put marquees everywhere they would fit, and then some. My colour choices were even more horrible than they are today. Somehow I managed to avoid entirely the use of the blink tag—dodged a bullet there.

After acquiring a passing knowledge of CSS, I ventured into PHP. Humans have a tendency to use whatever knowledge they acquire, of course, so I put my new PHP skills to good use and created my own blog software. This required me to leave Geocities for more dynamic pastures.

Adding Some Chrome

I jumped from Geocities to another free web hosting service that supported PHP. Unfortunately, it sucked. So I migrated to the now-long-defunct Chromehost, which had better service and a friendlier community. For months everything seemed great. I was developing my website and my hosting situation was stable—or was it?

The problem with free web hosting, of course, is that it’s inherently unreliable. While I don’t want to perpetuate the truism that “you get what you pay for” websites hosted for free exist on the sufference of Fortune, as Machiavelli might say. Chromehost went under—literally, poof!—and I was left without web hosting.

Toss in A Small Orange

That was it. I had had enough with free web hosting; it was time to up the ante. Fortunately Seth recommended a good, relatively inexpensive hosting company, and in October 2005 I purchased hosting from A Small Orange.

After nearly five years with ASO I have never once been disappointed by the service. The support ticket response time is blazingly fast and courteous. I lack for nothing when it comes to resources and features. The price of my package does not impoverish me, and the servers are stable with very little downtime. In a world where life is full of inconveniences and unfortunate events, ASO is a welcome fluke of karma.

Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Often Mistaken for Science

Peeking Under the Hood

For those who insist on peeking at the wizard behind the curtain, I have one thing to say to you: disgusting. Go find another site to cater to your desires.

For those who merely want to read about the inner workings of websites, here’s some of the technologies that sweat and toil every time you load the page:

Symphony CMS powers everything on my site except my blog. It’s a wonderfully flexible framework that uses PHP, XSLT, and XPath.
My blog runs VSNS Lemon, custom-made software. Once upon a time, I released it as free software for download. It sucked, though, and I’ve never quite found the time to make a new version worthy of public release. Some remnant of pride and a considerable amount of obstinacy prevents me from switching to WordPress.
I’m proficient with PHP; aside from the headaches caused by browser bugs, I eat HTML and CSS for breakfast. But force upon me a single line of raw JavaScript, and I will run screaming for the hills. Fortunately, I found jQuery, a JavaScript library that almost makes JavaScript make sense. With jQuery, I subdue the JavaScript beast beneath the mighty power of the DOM! Huzzah!

At various points in time, I’ve served my site as XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1 with an application/xhtml+xml content-type, and most recently as HTML 4. I wanted to avoid the XHTML quandary and get back to the basics. I figured I could keep my head down until something better, like the much-vaunted XHTML 2.0, came along and caught my roving-markup-language eye.

When I switched to Symphony CMS as the backend for my site, I took the opportunity to refactor and switch, yet again, the markup language of my choice. Rather than XHTML 2.0, which seems to be going nowhere, I’ve happily embraced HTML 5. Its various new semantically-rich elements have won me over in a way that an XML content-type never will. So that’s the story behind the doctype!

The tea cup background image is by .:Justin:..:Page:., used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License.

Near & Dear to my Heart

Other than those listed above, there are other services, scripts, and software that I recommend.

Services and Scripts

File-syncing and sharing service Dropbox seamlessly integrates with your computer.
I store all my photos on Flickr
I’m a big fan of Google in general and make use of its many applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Apps for Your Domain (to manage my site’s email).
Netfirms is currently my domain registrar of choice. Yahoo! and I broke up after they raised their prices to $34.95 a year.
Whenever possible, I use OpenID to identify across the Web.
DokuWiki is a wonderful, open source wiki platform that uses flat files instead of a database to store its content. I use it any time I have a project that involves a wiki.

Software

My operating system of choice is Kubuntu, but my quotidian OS is Windows 7.

Browser: Mozilla Firefox
E-book Management: Calibre
Email: GMail—I still have a soft spot for Mozilla Thunderbird, though
FTP Client: FileZilla
Graphics and Photo Manipulation: Inkscape, for vector art; GIMP, for non-vector formats and heavy photo editing; Picasa for photo management
IDE: Aptana Studio (Free)
Instant Messaging: Digsby
Music Player: iTunes, and for my portable needs, a black 2 GB first generation iPod Nano
PDF Reader: Foxit Reader (Free)
Word Processor: OpenOffice.org