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Colophon

Col-o-phon An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication.

While generally reserved for production and design notes at the end of a book, many website owners and bloggers have appropriated the word “colophon” as their own and as a replacement for an “about” page. Since we already have one of those, this really is the colophon and is here to tell you about how this crazy site is put together.

Technologies Used Here

The Benefit of Web Standards

This site has been constructed primarily based on recognized web standards. This means valid, well-structured code that produce pages which look great in modern web browsers but that also degrade gracefully (meaning, they don’t always look pretty but the content is still accessible) in older browsers.

  1. Lowers bandwidth and storage space requirements
  2. Increased separation of content from presentation code
  3. Simplified maintenance and updating
  4. Improved accessibility and repurposability to other browsers, platforms and devices
  5. Faster page loading
  6. Lower costs (bandwidth, development, etc.)

Opened Source

The site also makes use of numerous open-source and/or recognized standard technologies. Here’s the shortlist:

Technologies In Use Here
  • XHTML 1.0 Transitional,
  • CSS 2.1,
  • JavaScript,
  • PHP 4,
  • MySQL 4,
  • Movable Type,
  • Macromedia Flash,
  • QuickTime

Fonts

The fonts used throughout this site are specified via the site’s CSS file, though where possible we’re utilizing the excellent sIFR 2.0 to give visitors using modern web browsers a little something extra and enabling us to use custom fonts and without having to resort to cutting images.

Headings and other items using sIFR are set using the Neutra font family from House Industries.

Code Development

All site code was produced by hand using the venerable BBEdit text editor. Images, illustrations and other miscellaneous documents were all created using the Adobe Creative Suite. Our Notebook content is managed with ecto and published for your enjoyment using Movable Type.

Code Information & Copyright

One of our ongoing concerns is producing efficient, lean and valid standards-compliant code. We regularly review our own site code and that of projects we have completed to ensure that they follow the W3C guidelines as closely as possible.

While we recognize that there’s a lot to learn from studying the code of well designed websites, we kindly ask that you do not copy our site verbatim. It won’t take long for us to find out if you have and we reserve the right to request that misappropriated copies are taken down in a timely manner. Failing that, you'll get a nasty letter from our lawyer. Seriously.

That being said, feel free to examine our HTML and CSS as a learning tool. If you have any questions, we’d be happy to try to answer them for you so please do not hesitate to ask.