Deeden

• Articles
• Reading
• Podcast
• Feeds

Colophon

A colophon is an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts relative to its production, or so the dictionary says. I find them an interesting glimpse into the parts of the whole.

If this site was a book it would be bound by my sister Kathryn, and the design would so much better because of it.

Typefaces

The site uses Times New Roman for the main text. Not the most exciting selection I know, however after trying various other fonts I kept coming back to it. I've used a sans-serif font for years as my main font so I felt it was about time to try something different. For those of you who don't have Times New Roman installed, Times and Georgia are used before we settle on whatever serif font you have chosen as your default.

The main navigation and the headers within the footer use the lovely capitals of Gill Sans. I have some issues with Gill Sans; I'm not a fan of the lowercase letters, and sometimes it looks dodgy when it's bold, however the capitals are a work of genius and I'd use them pretty much everywhere if I could. The exact extent of Gill Sans use will probably change gradually as I settle on where I like it and where I don't.

If you're unfortunate enough to not have Gill Sans then you'll have to make do with one of the following, Andale Mono, Futura, Lucida Sans or your default sans-serif font.

Services

The site makes use of a number of other sites for certain portions of functionality. del.icio.us provides the back-end for the links I occasionally plonk onto the site. A little tagging and some simple parsing of the feed and bob's your uncle.

The other service I use is Twitter, to allow me to add simple short entries to the site. Twitter is one of those services that people seem to love or loathe so don't hold it against me if you're not a fan.

Software

I use a number of different tools in the "design", development and testing of the site. Textmate is my editor of choice and I use it to edit the HTML and CSS when adding a new page, or substantially changing an existing one.

Expression Engine

I use ExpressionEngine to manage the site and have found it, after a rather steep learning curve, an invaluable and flexible tool.

A number of EE plugins are used within the site, namely:

• Character Limiter
• EE Gravatar
• FeedGrab
• Magpie RSS Parser
• Markdown
• MarkyPants
• No Follow
• Smarty Pants
• Time Ago
• Word Limiter
• XML Encode

Yes, I did write one of the above and I will be releasing it in the not too distant future.

Standards

HTML

The site uses HTML 4.01 Strict. I've decided to go with that option, at least until HTML5 is widely available. More knowledgeable people than I have put forward their reasons for choosing HTML over XHTML, feel free to go and find out why they've done it. The pages were validated during the initial development phase, and I've tried not to break anything.

CSS

The site makes extensive use of CSS. I don't use any inline CSS, preferring to keep the CSS in separate files. Right now my css is all in one file however this is subject to change, not that you should notice either way.

Modern browsers should display the site pretty much as intended, some things may not look exactly as intended in older browsers. I've made the decision not to worry about those browsers all that much.

Feeds

The feeds for the site are a mixture of RSS and Atom formats. Feeds which are generated by scripts tend to be RSS feeds unless I've had the inclination to update the scripts. The main site feeds are all Atom version 1.0 feeds. All feeds are validated on a semi-regular basis using the wonderful Feed Validator.

Hosting

This site is happily hosted with Dreamhost and has been for a number of years.