Technical Requirements
Browsers Supported
This site has been written and fully tested on both Firefox and Safari, both running on the latest Mac OS (Snow Leopard) at the time of this writing. No effort has been made to validate the site on any version of Internet Explorer, the reason for this is actually very simple but requires a bit of explanation
I work in the Information Technology sector, having spent many years building both internal and external sites, I know from experience how incompatible almost all versions of Internet Explorer are with the rest of the standards compliant browsing world. I'm not anti-Microsoft per-se, I use their tools almost every day and they make some great products. But when your designing a site for public consumption, you quickly find that there are very large and insurmountable differences between not only Internet Explorer and other browsers but also different versions of Internet Explorer. What works on version 6, does not always work on version 7 or 8, forcing developers to do some pretty nasty hacks to make everything appear correct.
Because this site is my own personal endeavor, I've done my best to stay standards compliant, However I simply didn't want to spend the effort to make the site compatible with Internet Explorer, since the site is Web 2.0 compliant, they can fix their browser, I'm not going to hack my site to fix their issue.
As long as your running Firefox (any version beyond 3.0), Safari (any version) or Opera you should fine, I did no other testing and if your having problems then I suggest you click on one of the links on the side and get yourself a better browser ;). One thing to note is that site uses a number of CSS 2.0 features that Mozilla uses, making things look even better.
Site Engine
The site is running on Apache 2.x using PHP 6, everything is hooked to MySql MySQL 5.x for the backend database. I chose PHP because it's free, stable and well documented, for many years I was a Coldfusion developer, have spent time between the two languages, I actually prefer Coldfusion. Because it's a tag based language it's much easier to integrate smoothly into a webpage, I'm not knocking PHP. It's a great language to work in and I was able to pick up pretty quickly, but it's missing a number of things that I would made development easier.
Development Tools
Everything was written using Adobe's CS4 toolset: Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks. I've used their tools for years and they just keep getting better, I use eclipse and CFEclipse for other work, but when your both coding and desiging a site, there is nothing better in my opinion than Dreamweaver. It just makes working on a website so much easier, in fact this site sat in limbo while I waited for my CS4 upgrade, I could have used other tools but didn't want the hassle.
I'm using a Quad 1.66Mhz Mac-Pro, running 8 core processers and 8 Gigs of memory, the machine has over 1.5TB's of storage and is using a Western Digital Velociraptor for quick response times (someday I'll move to the boot drive to an SSD!!). I also used MAMP for my development environment, I could have setup everything myself, but MAMP makes it so much easier I figured why re-invent the wheel. I've been using a mac in one way or another for almost 10 years, when they released leopard I reached my limit with the virus non-sense on my windows machine and made the jump to a Mac-Mini. The transition was helped by the fact that I've been around Macs for years, it took a little time but I've come to love Leopard, I'm currently running Snow Leopard which is even better, if I had one complaint it's that Apples key mappings are backwards. Maybe it's years of coding on windows machines, but I think Microsoft got the key mappings right, in fact some programs like Dreamweaver actually re-map the macs keyboard to act like a windows keyboard. Sweet!!
Blog Engine
The blog engine is done using WordPress, it's a wonderfully simple yet mature system that took very little time to actually integrate into the site. The longest part was doing all the CSS work, but the WordPress engine is very easy to use and easy to maintain. It also has a very active community and great documentation, I was able to install it in about 10 minutes, and then it only took about 2 hours to get it running in the framework by making my own WordPress Theme, it's much easier than it seems and I was able to up and running in very little time.
For more information click on the WordPress logo on the side menu.
Gallery Engine
Many years ago when I was working at Macromedia I needed to find some kind of slideshow engine, after doing some looking I found SlideShow Pro. Since that time it's grown and changed and all for the good, the original version was always good, but each release they add shiny new features (something I'm a sucker for). I can't say enough good things about them, they have always had good support, good prices and a great product. You will find it all over the site, any where you have a box with rotating pictures it's running SlideShow Pro, I couldn't do this site without them. And here's the ultra cool part, they have an admin for the gallery. So all I do is login, upload, arrange, comment on my pictures all from my desktop and then upload them when i'm done... AWESOME!!!
