Colophon

Publishing

This site is powered by the WordPress blogging platform. The site template is based on Revolution by Brian Gardner with several template customizations by yours truly.

The site uses several WordPress plug-ins including: Akismet (protects comments against spam), Breadcrumb Navigation XT (for breadcrumb navigation), Limit Posts (limits displayed text length on index page entries), My Page Order (lets you set the order of pages with a gui), Post Thumb Revisited (creates thumbnail images from posts), Search Unleashed (provides full text searching across posts, pages, comments, and titles), Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form (features accessibility and usability and anti-spam and anti-exploit features), Shadowbox JS (a media-viewer script that allows content to be viewed without navigating away from the page, similar to Lightbox or Thickbox), tags4page (adds native Worpdress 2.3 tagging support to pages too, and WP 2.3 Related Posts (generates a related posts list via WorPdress 2.3 tags).

Hosting

The site is hosted by pair Networks, a reliable and environmentally friendly web hosting provider on a FreeBSD server running the Apache web server.

Open Source

90% of the software that is used in producing and serving this site (including FireFox, WordPress, FreeBSD, and Apache) are Open Source. Why is open source important? It provides better quality software that is reliable, flexible, and lower in cost, without predatory vendor lock-in. If you use the world wide web you benefit from open source, even though you may never write or see a line of code yourself. Part of the reason the web is so accessible and available to so many people is the ubiquity of open source software keeps barriers to entry low. Anyone can set up a Linux server for the cost of the hardware and internet connection. There is no additional Microsoft operating system tax on the server.

While open source software has been an amazing success in server software, it has not made the same inroads on the desktop. And even though tools like Open Office provide a viable alternative of Office, when it comes to media creation, I use proprietary tools like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Photoshop since there are no open source tools as good as these and I’m a pragmatist and idealist, but not blinded by open source ideology. I love my MacBook Pro, since there’s nothing better than the Mac OSX Aqua interface. On the other hand, when it comes to web servers and server operating systems, Linux and FreeBSD, and their many variants, offer superior reliability. Mac OSX has a unix foundation, and can be used for developing server apps that you can deploy on Linux or FreeBSD servers. A related issue is open standards. Even when using proprietary tools, it’s critical to archive and share media using standards that are freely available and do not require proprietary tools to access and/or edit.