A View from Stanage Edge in the Peak District

Project - Personal Website

(Updated: 14 April 2017)

I've had a homepage in one form or another since I first got an internet connection in the 90s. Here's a few facts about the current incarnation.


Contents:


Questions

Why was this site created?

For several reasons, really. I wanted my own 'little corner' of the internet (to stake out my own territory, if you like) and I wanted to gain experience in HTML and CSS. Also, in the past, I have spent a lot of time on forums expressing opinions and discussing various 'exotic' subjects.

But, over time, I've come to realise that those discussions get buried by newer threads and eventually get lost, deep within the forum database. I then find myself revisiting the same subjects and expressing the same opinions to different people. So, I decided that I needed to put my thoughts in one place, for easy reference.

I decided against a blog because I feel that you generate a pressure on yourself to regularly update it and I think that dilutes the quality of the content. In other words, I feel blogs encourage a rambling style of dialogue and I want a more static and precise medium for my material.


What about the title picture?

It's an area in the Peak District, here in the UK, near a place called Stanage Edge. I took the picture in mid-October 2007, at about 10.00am - I loved the way autumn colours blended with the morning mist in the valley and thought it would be perfect as a title graphic.


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Tools Used to Create this Site

Everything was created on my Xubuntu Linux machine using free and open-source software. All the software used is available through the official Ubuntu Package Repositories, which allows seamless download and installation and ensures that they are automatically kept up-to-date.


Filezilla - FTP Client

Home Page - (win/linux)

Extract from the Web Site:

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.

My Comment:

Now that filezilla is cross-platform, it's become my choice of FTP client.


Geany - A Fast and Lightweight IDE

Home Page - (win/linux)

Extract from the Web Site:

Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.

My Comment:

Geany is ideal for small projects.


GIMP - Image Manipulation and Editing

Home Page - (win/linux)

Extract from the Web Site:

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

My Comment:

It's a good FREE alternative to Adobe Photoshop.


Home Page - (Platform Independent - Javascript)

Extract from the Web Site:

Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

My Comment:

If you turn on javascript for my site, you will see a very nice effect when viewing images from the galleries.


PHP - Hypertext Preprocessor

Home Page - (Platform Independent)

Extract from the Web Site:

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

My Comment:

I chose PHPoole because it's written in PHP, my current "go to" scripting language.


PHPoole - Static Website Generator

Home Page - (Platform Independent - PHP)

Extract from the Web Site:

An easy and lightweight static website generator. PHPoole is a CLI that merge documents and templates to build a static Website.

My Comment:

This site has been created using PHPoole - I'm still getting to grips with this software - the documentation is lacking some important details, but the features, once understood, are flexible enough to create a variety of site patterns. Markdown content and Twig templates are combined to generate the various pages of the site, but how the content is organised isn't immediately obvious.


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Page Generated: 2017-05-28