The Wikipedia claims that “Detailed colophons are a characteristic feature of limited edition and private press printing.” This site is my private press. Pictures of past designs are available in this Flickr set.
Inspiration
Occasionally I worry that this site resembles Khoi Vinh’s superb Subtraction too closely. Still, as Picasso said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.” By this measure, I am a bad artist—something that anyone who’s seen me paint will attest to.
The Coudal Partners’ site is a treasure-trove of fascinating links and superior products, and their printerly aesthetic is probably the most obvious visual inspiration for this design. Special mention must be made of the Museum of Online Museums.
A List Apart needs no introduction, and much of what I know about design, web standards and stylesheets was learnt by poring over their articles. Their new site is too wide, but nobody’s perfect.
Adam Greenfield has probably shaped my thinking about the internet more than anyone else, and his ALA piece ‘The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes’ is possibly the best article ever published there, which is saying a lot.
Technicalities
The templates of this site, past and present, have all been hand-coded in Windows-based text editor EditPlus. There appear to be a plethora of good text editors for the Mac; Windows PCs are not so fortunate, and EditPlus is about the best I’ve found.
Documents on this site are written in XHTML and styled with CSS 2.1. All pages ought to validate; if they don’t, please let me know (I like to fix my bugs).
Most of the site is powered by WordPress, a “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” It doesn’t do everything I want, but fortunately there’s a great community out there who’ve written a load of plugins to cover the more obvious blindspots. A list of the ones in use on this site is available here.
‘Pressed Words’ and ‘There is No Beep’ are a pair of posts I made about my experiences with WordPress; the first compares it to the alternatives that were available when I started writing here regularly, while the second explains how to create a custom 404 error (“File not found”) page.
This site is hosted on the Homeworld Community Server.
With thanks to…
Eric, for all the design advice over the years; Chris and Stuart for fielding my stupid programming questions; Alex, for being the best server admin anyone could hope for. Lastly, John Allison, without whom the world would be a less colourful place.