Colophon

A lot of technical info about the site and its production.

CSS, HTML Standards & Accessibility

This site consists almost entirely of static web pages, XHTML 1.0 Strict, using CSS to stylize the otherwise bare HTML content. This is done as much as possible following accessibility and standards recommendations of the W3C.

Accessibility notes

If you are not using a standards-compliant browser, or for any reason your browser does not support CSS, everything will still be accessible to you. The content will simply display in a very basic, minimally formatted layout. To view the site as it was intended, in its full glory, you need a standards-compliant, modern graphical browser.

The site has been designed to work in both cases. For example, using standards-compliant browsers you will see the graphical menus, but if you were using non-CSS, or older, non-standards-compliant browsers, menus still work because they degrade gracefully into simple, bulleted link lists. Another example is in the way standards-compliant browsers will show the column based layout, whereas non-CSS or non-standards-compliant browsers will simply collapse columns into a single flow of text. This text still reads logically from top to bottom, consistently from page to page. A skip navigation link exists at the start of each page, which is helpful if you are in this lengthy, flowed mode of display.

Extra accessibility features

All main menu items are assigned accesskeys starting from number 1. For instance the first main menu item is the home link, so on a Windows computer you could type alt-1 to reach the home link. In this way you can navigate main menu items without using a mouse. Hopefully this will make someone’s life easier.

Printing

When you print a page, you automatically get the essential page contents in a printer-friendly format. In addition, pages printed with a standards-compliant browser will reveal the URLs of hyperlinks in the page. Further details on how this works, as well as additional printer-friendly ideas, can be found in the the ALA article CSS Design: Going to Print.

Mostly Open Source software

Most of the software used for this site is Open Source, which also means they are available as free and well supported software you can easily find through a web search, or find at Sourceforge.net. 

The website was developed mostly on a Windows computer but running open source software: Apache HTTP Server with PHP and MySQL, before being uploaded to the live server.

Content Management System (CMS)

To manage the simple, brochure-like content of this personal site and render it with highly customizable templates and designs, I use PHPCMS. It’s a web-based, small-sized yet highly flexible, no-database CMS. I chose to use it because it has integrated, unlimited-depth information hiearchy abilities, flexibility, and a really nice spidering feature to "bake" or render the site into static, offline-viewable web pages.

Art pages

Art pages are generated by custom PHP scripts that are made to combine data about the artwork, stored in a MySQL database, with a PHPCMS empty page that acts like a template. So when I press a publish button I set up called Make All Art, it generates all art-related PHPCMS content files, so that PHPCMS then parses them upon request the same way it processes any other page on the website. Thumbnails were made beforehand by running TFTGallery, making use of its automatic thumbnail-making feature.

Guestbook

The guestbook page uses the PHPCMS scripts feature, so that the main bulk of the page is actually the output of a guestbook script located in another folder. The guestbook script was modified from a free Swedish guestbook script called gaboPHP that I found in 2000. Their website no longer seems to work, but if you need something similar and don’t mind editing html, you can download one of my versions of it from the useful page.

What's a colophon?

Traditionally, a note included by a book publisher, explaining the fonts or unique techniques used in printing that book.

Behind the scenes

Look at this empty page. Actual templates consist of too many small pieces to show here, so this is only end output as a single page, no content.

PHP-style ($)variables were added. Makes the page useable as a skin for custom php pages that I didn’t have time to integrate with default templating.

Also see blogger templates for archives index and a blog page.