About andymurdoch.com
I decided to create this page in order to expand my knowledge of computing into web-design and I've found it rather a consuming hobby. Registering the domain name was really easy, as was writing the HTML. All the pages were written by hand, not using a WYSIWYG editor because I wanted control over the output.
The nice blue bars are provided by cascading style sheets in order provide flexibility and keep download times to minimum. SSI is used to provide the titles and the navigation boxes to the right.
In September 2004, I updated the static pages to use XHTML and CSS, so if you're browsing with Mozilla there are some alternate stylesheets available which you can select using the icon at the bottom left of your browser.
Technologies and Credits
Much of this site's tools are modified versions of publicly available scripts, which anybody can use to enhance their site. The tools and technologies used are listed below:
Webhosting
This site is hosted by Freeola who are also my ADSL providers. They currently offer unlimited web-space to their ADSL customers which should be a good thing for me if the forum takes off.
The sites are hosted on FreeBSD platforms, running Apache web servers. There is configured support for Perl & PHP.
Static Content
The static content has been hand crafted using various editors whilst the graphics were produced using Adobe Photoshop. The general layout and style sheets were originally sourced from OSWD but have been extensively modified since then. I'm afraid I've forgotten which template I originally used so I can't give the author a credit - if you recognise your work, drop me a line and I'll rectify the situation.
Dynamic Content
I've recently added a lot of dynamic content, all of it in the form of perl scripts, with a little bit of javascript thrown in. Here is a list of all the stuff that is used in this site:
- Select Page Menu - The javascript for this menu was generated from ClanTemplates' site map menu generator
- Search - This perl script was downloaded from Matt's Script Archive. I need to change all the page headers so that the page results are distinguishable from one another.
- Source Code Formatter - The source in my C++ section get nicely formatted by the Code2HTML perl script.
- Contact Form - The form on the contact page uses a script from The Site Wizard.
- Forum - The forum uses YaBB, a fatastic set of perl scripts that make a very powerful bulletin board.
- Validator - This is the W3C's validator. Its incredibly handy to have an automated link to this tool on every page.
- Keyword Analyser - The keyword analyser script is from R'n'R Technologies, I really must get around to making it work properly.
- Referrer - This set of scripts is from the Fluid Dynamics Software Corporation. The graphs are very nice, not sure what I'll do with the information though. SSI is used to call the scripts to track visitor movement throughout the site.
- Comments - The commenting system is a little hack that I've added to the YaBB code.
There's still a few bugs iron out, but I'll get around to it...
