amphichon

Courtesy of our friends at Wikipedia:

In publishing, a colophon describes details of the production of a book. This information generally includes the typefaces used, and often the names of their designers; the paper, ink and details of the binding materials and methods may also receive mention. In the case of technical books, a colophon may specify the software used to prepare the text and diagrams for publication. Detailed colophons are a characteristic feature of limited edition and private press printing.

So, here is where I’ll tell you a bit about what goes into the making of my pages, from the actual software on the server, to the themes and plugins in use, to the tools I use here to put everything together.

Server-side

The backbone of the site is of course Wordpress, currently at version 2.04. I’ve been using Wordpress on amphichon for just over a year now and have been very pleased with the flexibility and functionality. It’s done in PHP with a MySQL backend, it’s open source under the GPL, and it has a huge amount of community involvement and support. If you’re looking for a blogging tool that’s free, fast, powerful, extensible and fun to use, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

In a mostly separate installation, we use Gallery2 to host our image albums. To be honest this installation needs some updating, but for now it continues to provides a pretty robust album-based image solution. Tools to integrate it more closely with Wordpress are available also – in previous themes we used the WPG2 plugin, and we’ll likely be setting that up again as we update the Gallery install, but for now we’re sort of cheating by using symlinks and mod_rewriting to point at specific images from within Wordpress as needed (ie, in the case of the random image generator on the homepage).

Themes

The theme I’m using (as of 6 August 2006) is called MistyLook. I won’t spend a lot of time on this as it’s likely to change (changing themes in Wordpress is as simple as uploading it and selecting it in the admin options). For those following the evolution of the site since last year, you’ll notice that we’re continuing to move from complex and ornate designs to simpler and cleaner looks. The first Wordpress theme on amphichon was Jakarta, which I still think is a beautiful theme, but it was a little too heavy and difficult to get into W3C compliance with. From there we moved to Connections, which was in place until a few days ago. Connections too is still a very likable look but we were due for a change.

Here are the customizations I’ve made to the current theme, for future reference:

• In the header, I’ve replaced the image, brought over the title and description styles from the ‘connections’ theme with some minor tweaks, and applied the ‘wittytext’ plugin from the last incarnation.
• In the sidebar, the ‘profile’ box was redone, the random image box was added, and W3C compliance icons for CSS and XHTML were added.
• In the footer, an ad link was removed (!) and link to this colophon added.

• In the stylesheet, various tweaks were applied across the board, including to the header background image and styles, random image formatting, &c.

  At the moment, each time I switch themes, I go in and tweak the necessary bits, but ultimately where we need to go is to drop all of the amphichon-specific CSS and code into separate modules that plug in a little more gracefully. Once that’s done, you may see the general look of the site change more frequently while the major tweaks remain in place.

  The header image, incidentally, is a view of the Pacific from the beach at Seaside, Oregon. It was taken in the fall of 2005, as Alex and Todd and I were on our pilgrimage to Astoria, home of the Goonies.

  Plugins

  Here are the plugins currently in use at amphichon:

• Akismet v1.15, by Matt Mullenweg. Detects and quarantines comment spam. Indispensable.
• Postie v0.9.9.3.2, by Dirk Elmendorf. Provides some upgrades to Wordpress’s built-in Post-by-Mail features. Haven’t used this lately but it’s very handy when traveling or using mobile devices.
• Random Filename – heh, well, this is mine. Wrote it last night to simplify and generalize the process of scanning a directory and returning a random filename from within it. This is the engine behind the random image box on the homepage. The plugin is at v0.1 now, which in my terms means it works but only just. I’ll be cleaning it up and when I do I’ll drop it onto the WP Plugins page, in case anyone else might benefit from it.
• Textile 2 (improved) v2.02, which is Jim Riggs’ PHP implementation of Brad Choate’s Textile 2, packaged for WP by Adam Gessaman. It’s billed as a ‘humane web text generator’ – in a nutshell it lets you mostly forget about HTML syntax and instead use some simple and readable markup codes. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with HTML, but when you’re writing an article you want to focus on the words, not the markup. Textile lets you do that.

• Witty Text v1.1(?), by Alexander Malov. It’s a very simple plugin that opens a text file, selects a random line and spits it out. My version has been tweaked more than once, so it’s technically not v1.1 anymore. I am indebted to Alexander – this is the plugin from which I learned the basics of making WP plugins.

  Web hosting

  Last but not least, hosting since January has been provided by Dreamhost. Their plans are both inexpensive and feature-rich (including shell access, PHP, MySQL, tons of other tools I haven’t even explored yet, and more space and bandwidth than I’ll ever need, for pennies a day), but besides that, they seem like a genuinely nice bunch of folks to do business with.

  Dreamhost offers all sorts of promotional deals and referral bonuses. I’ve largely been avoiding that, but if you’ve read this far, maybe you’re interested in a promo code that benefits us as well as you. If you’d like to sign up, just click here, or (from their main signup page) use the promo code amphichon50, and you’ll save $50 off any plan. (The monthly plans have a $50 setup fee, so essentially it waves that fee. The yearly plans though are where the $50 off will really count.)

  Full disclosure – if you sign up for a monthly plan with my promo code, they’ll knock $0.05 off my bill (woohoo!), and if you sign up for a yearly plan, they’ll knock $47.00 off my bill (woohoo woohoo!). Now, if you google ‘Dreamhost promo codes’ you’ll find all sorts of people offering their own promo codes, many of which will save you more than mine. I offer this code for two reasons – one, nobody should have to pay $50 (!) for a setup fee, and two, so you can use it if you choose to support my site, with the knowledge that I’m basically splitting the kickback with you.

  Client-side

  Since December 2005, all development for amphichon has been done on an Apple Powerbook G4 running OS X 10.4.x. In that time the Powerbook has gone from PDA and writing tool to my primary computer that goes with me nearly everywhere. It’s true what they say about Macs – in a very real way, they let you stop worrying about how to do things and just do them. Highly, highly recommended.

  Indispensable tools

  Here are some of the software tools I use when working on the site:

• Mozilla Firefox, of course. It’s far too processor-intensive in OSX, and I do use both Safari and Camino from time to time as well, but whenever any serious work needs to get done, I always end up back in Firefox.
• BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software, is hands down the best GUI-based editor in the world. Fast, flexible, extensible and intuitive – it’s everything you’ll ever need in a text editor and much more. I do all of my HTML, PHP and CSS editing in BBEdit. I would have gone crazy long ago were it not for its seamless edit-on-server functionality – tweaking CSS in real time has never been easier. (Note that TextWrangler, also by Bare Bones Software, is free and offers most of the same functionality.)
• Adobe Photoshop CS2 is like using an anvil as a paperweight for most of the work that I do, but still and all I find myself using it pretty often. I guess my comfort level with it on the Mac is somehow better than on the PC, strange though that may be. I do occasionally use iPhoto, Preview and the venerable GraphicConverter as well, for simple tasks, but for most things I sooner or later end up in Photoshop.
• Fetch is our FTP client of choice here. I’ve also used Fugu and Transmit among others, but Fetch embodies everything that’s good about the Mac – it’s fast, elegant, and simple. There’s probably documentation available for it, but I’ve never needed it – it just works. And it’s got a little dog that runs as you’re accessing the remote server – how cool is that?
• Free Ruler is a surprisingly useful little tool when fiddling with graphics editing and web pages. It’s just a free-floating ruler that measures in inches, pixels, centimeters or picas. When you need to know what size to make an image to fit in a particular space, or how far to adjust a margin, nothing beats Free Ruler. (And, as the name implies, it’s free.)
• Jumpcut is a new addition to my toolbox. It’s a tiny little app that basically remembers the last ‘x’ clipboard items. Very useful when accumulating links or clippings for insertion in an article. I have to keep reminding myself it’s there, because it’s not part of my automatic workflow yet, but whenever I do use it things go much faster. Jumpcut is free and open sourced under the MIT license.
• QuickSilver , from Blacktree, Inc., is not specifically web-related, but once you’ve started using it, it’s absolutely indispensable for getting anything done in OSX. I use it religiously, and if you spend any amount of time on a Mac and you’re not using Quicksilver, you are doing yourself a serious disservice. Get it and find out for yourself just how much easier life can be. Quicksilver is freeware, though closed source for now. (There’s an amusing exchange about this on the Quicksilver forums.)

  Dispensable tools

  Here is some software that, surprisingly enough, I do not use on amphichon:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver (I refuse to call it Adobe Dreamweaver, dammit, it was made by Macromedia.) Believe it or not, I used to swear by Dreamweaver in Windows, I actually have a legitimate license for it and everything, so you’d think I’d be using it here on the Mac. And I suppose if I ended up putting together a graphically-complex site I might yet use it. But for the kind of work I’ve been doing in the last year or so, it’s just not necessary. BBEdit gives me everything I need. And while I can’t claim that my XHTML or CSS is particularly tight or elegant, it’s still somewhat better than what automated tools like Dreamweaver put out. So for now this one continues to grab some bench.
• Rapidweaver, from RealMac Software, is a fast and friendly tool for quick website design. Looks sexy, simple to use, designed from the ground up for the Mac, got some excellent press, very highly rated across the board. I used it once, and yeah, it does seem nice. Not really what I need at the moment though (see also the notes on Dreamweaver above). Haven’t felt the need to use it lately but hey, you never know.
• ecto is a blogging tool that I have heard, and continue to hear, good things about. It’s not free though, and it stops working so abruptly and gracelessly, at the end of what seemed like an awfully short trial, that it rubbed me the wrong way. So I am passing on it for now. I’ll admit that some of the software I use is licensed somewhat creatively, but I can and do pay for software, particularly shareware tools that prove both useful and friendly. The jury’s still out on ecto, though, and in the meantime I’ve got plenty of other options (not least of which is the Wordpress web interface, which is sufficient for most posts anyway).

  Questions? Suggestions? Thoughts? Please leave your comments below.

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