About the site
This website is constantly evolving, things you can see will change and probably lots of bits you can’t see will be changing. However it will always be true to my core principles of design and development. So briefly here goes:
Design & typography
The site layout is an elastic layout. That means that as you increase you text size, the width and spacing on the site will alter in accordance. The typography has had special attention. Following the fantastic work done by Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton on web typography, I have adopted many of these practices and added a touch of my own spice to get to where this site is now. All text is sized in ems, set to a baseline rhythm of 21px based on a user agent default of 18px.
This site has been tried and tested on a number of user agents like Apples iPhone & iPod touch, Nokia N92 and the Nokia N770 internet tablet. I’m happy to say it looks wonderful on all of these devices. If you have a picture of my site running on an interesting or unusual device (Nintendo Wii or PS3 anyone?) send me a picture and i’ll place it online here.
Note for users of IE6 and below. I’m not guaranteeing the visual aspects of the site will be complete in IE6 or below. The content will always be acessible but the imagery or spacing might be a little iffy. This is because for this personal site i’m not officialy supporting those browsers.
Content Management System (CMS)
For the Content Management of this website i’m using Ellislab’s Expression Engine. Having previously used Textpattern, this is my first foray into Expression Engine land and so far i’m loving the power and simplicity this systems offers plus the great user community.
The system is pretty much out of the box with all custom built templates and the help of the following plugins & modules:
- Link list module – Great for adding blogrolling capabilities into the Expression Engine CMS. It works because it has XFN friends microformatting as standard and keeps you having to add new weblogs for no real reason except adding more link lists.
- TruncHTML – Truncates HTML/Text to the specified number of characters. Does not count characters in HTML-tags, does not cut-off in the middle of tags, closes all open tags.
- Textile – What would a CMS be without Textile. Must be all those years with Textpattern!
- SWFObject 2.0 – For adding those Flash SWF files in a lovely accessible, progressive enhanced way. Now on Google code.
Built using
At home i’m an Apple Mac guy, at work i’m PC. That said I find designing or developing so much faster on the Mac, if only the industry could see how to make developers more content in their work – give them a nice shiny new Mac and watch productivity go through the roof!
Any my tools of choice used on this website are:
- Apple Macook pro – 2.16ghz with 2GB ram and a Fastmac battery (yes they do last longer)
- Textmate – The best text editor on the Mac without question
- Adobe CS3 suite – All graphics etc
- Web developer toolbar – the ultimate in web development extensions for Firefox
- Transmit SFTP – The best FTP & SFTP program I have found.
