This site
Hardware
Adactio was created on Apple Macintosh computers.
My first Mac was a Ruby coloured G3 iMac that has since been passed along to my mother. I'm now using a 17" G4 iMac as my desktop machine. I also have a 12" iBook for when I'm on the move.
Both Macs are running OS X with Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL installed, effectively making them staging servers.
Both Macs, along with Jessica's 15" G4 iMac and 12" iBook, have airport cards installed so we have a nice little wireless network going.
The photos on this site were taken with a Fuji FinePix 1300 digital camera.
Software
When I'm writing PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript or just about anything that's text-based, I use BBEdit from Bare Bones Software. It doesn't suck®.
For image manipulation, page layouts and just about anything else graphical in nature, I use Photoshop 7 from Adobe. I use iPhoto from Apple to organise my photo collection. ImageWell is a handy little app for grabbing screenshots, manipulating images and even FTPing them to a server.
For nearly all my FTP and SFTP needs, I use Transmit from Panic Software, a bunch of fellow Mac enthusiasts and Star Wars geeks.
Whenever I need to mess around with the command line, I like to use iTerm.
My web browser of choice is Safari. Before that, it was Camino (formerly Chimera). Before that, I used Microsoft Internet Explorer 5. I still use these for testing, along with browsers from Netscape and Opera.
Another invaluable testing tool is Virtual PC. I can test on different versions of Internet Explorer and other Windows browsers.
Tech specs
Adactio is hosted on a FreeBSD box running Apache. The site is hosted by Segment Publishing, an Australian web hosting company.
Server-side
Server-side programming is handled by PHP. There are include files for recurring page elements such as the header and footer of each page. The navigation, which is part of each page's header, is generated on the fly by examining the current page's URL to figure out what to display.
The journal uses a homemade content managment system.
Client-side
Adactio is written in valid XHTML strict and uses CSS for the layouts of each design theme.
Each page of the site is divided into elements wrapped up in semantically labelled <div> tags: "logo", "navigation", "eyecandy", "extra", "content" and "footer". By applying CSS positioning to these page elements, a range of layouts is possible.
Each design theme on offer uses a series of stylesheets. The basic stylesheet is readable by any CSS capable web browser. The stylesheets controlling typography and positioning are only visible to more recent, standards compliant browsers.
When someone chooses a new design theme, a cookie with the name of the theme is stored on their web browser. The PHP header file uses this cookie variable to point to the correct folder of stylesheets for that theme.
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tatemodern
seaside
hi-tech
zeldman
adactizilla
sci-fi
renaissance
hirnlego
