About this site
Tools
Though there's never been much to show for it on the surface, behind the scenes, this site has had a colourful history. It's always been written entirely by hand on a Mac, but the tools used have changed quite a bit. The original version was written in MPW under Mac OS 9, but the inevitable move to OS X has entailed some changes. Now I'm using an odd mix of TextWrangler and vi, plus cpp and sed for a little bit of preprocessing, all tied together by make.
Previous versions have used htmlpp from iMatix, an HTML preprocessor written in perl. I've used it both via MacPerl hosted in MPW, and later natively under OSX. That was always a bit of an overkill for my purposes so I switched to cpp. It's not an ideal choice for working with HTML, but it can be made to work pretty well, and it makes a certain amount of sense for a C programmer like me.
Hosting
![[force9]](http://portal.f9.net.uk/images/banners/banner_9.gif)
This site is currently hosted by force9 who also provide my ADSL connection, whilst the domain name is registered with 123-reg.co.uk. I'd happily recommend either company.
Standards
The HTML and CSS at this site have been validated, though it's still only transitional HTML rather than strict. One day I'll get around to cleaning it up.
If you spot any mistakes or broken links, or if you have any comments do email me. There are some things validators can't spot!
The original version of this site used HTML tables for layout. I've finally made the transition to CSS which greatly simplifies the HTML, and should make my site much more accessible. Thankfully, now Netscape Navigator 4.x has all but disappeared there's no longer any excuse for designers to write bad HTMl.
Web design
Some of the following were useful as learning tools or reference for HTML and CSS:
- NCSA HTML Primer - A good (if old fashioned) starting point if you've never seen any HTML before
- The W3C HTML Validator.
- The W3C CSS2 Specification - The official specification of CSS2. Surprisingly readable.
- Web Design Group - Helpful site for designing standards compliant websites
- glish.com CSS Layout Techniques - Very useful site with examples of how to get decent layout using CSS.
- ciwas stylesheet authoring FAQ - The FAQ of the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets
This site was last modified on 28 Oct 18:35 2005.
![[Made with Macintosh]](macmade.gif)