About this site

This site is, at the moment, a motley collection of Mark's interests and writing, as well as an excuse to play around with CSS and web design. The hope is to eventually put up some of the more interesting stuff that has been sitting around on my computer for a while now.

As Linus Torvalds once observed, "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it". FTP, HTTP, whatever...

Colophon

This site is published using Pivot for blogging and DokuWiki for the rest of the site's content. I chose to use these tools as both have flexible templating, well organised code and, importantly, neither require a MySQL database on the server. This means I can simply synchronize the entries directory of my "live" site (hosted as part of Frogworth Corp.) with a copy living on my Powerbook and everything Just Works. Nice.

I use the excellent Transmit to do most of the bit shunting between my computer and the server.

The CSS writing and templating was done using SubEthaEdit. The layout has been tested (and seems to work okay) in Firefox, Camino and Safari. The main font used throughout the site is Helvetica.

I use Journler to write the entries and ideas before posting them to this site. The text I write is processed into HTML by a PHP implementation of John Gruber's Markdown by both Pivot and DokuWiki.

Inspiration

As when learning anything, it pays to study those who do it well. The layout and design of this site has been inspired by a number of sites around the web. Of these, the most influential have been:

• Khoi Vinh's Subtraction
• John Gruber's Daring Fireball
• Steve Dekorte's simple and elegant site
• Stefan Geens' Blog and his use of marginaliaMarginalia is the general term for notes, scribbles, doodles and editorial comments made in the margin of a book. - Wikipedia.
• Feed icons are courtesy of feedicons.com.
• ... and others that I will put up when I remember them.

A Note to Internet Explorer Users

Some of the graphics and presentation of this site might look a bit broken to users of some browers such as Internet Explorer (IE). Although a large number of people use IE to surf the web it has well known security, usability and compatibility problems.

This site is a personal one with an intended audience of technically capable people. These people tend to use standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Safari (for Macs), and Opera. This site should look fine with all of those browsers. I've decided that the time, effort and hacks required to make this site also work with IE is just not worth it.

If you are using IE I would recommend switching to one of the free alternatives listed above.