Tech Info: Under the hood at Live Sensibly

My background

I started mucking around with an IBM PC in 1984 when my employer bought an 8088 with a 10MB hard drive. Migrated from there to mainframe COBOL and CICS, and rode the consulting boom through the 90s.

This is my first real web development project. It’s been a fun trip (or flying leap off a cliff, sometimes).

I’m still a hand-coder, just like the COBOL days, for building my Movable Type templates. I’ve seen Dreamweaver, HomeSite, and StyleMaster in action but I like the simplicity and direct control I get from cranking it out myself.

Framework

Coming from a mainframe background, it astounds me that an application as robust and customizable as Movable Type is so accessible for a guy like me. Thanks, Ben and Mena. I’m running it on a Windows server with MySQL.

Pages and stylesheets validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2.

I love my web host. UpLinkearth.com has given impeccable service at a very decent price. They are responsive and helpful, even getting things done quickly during hours when they had announced holiday closings.

Development Tools

• Code editor: SPF/SE 3.5.
• FTP tool: WebDrive 6, handy access to my web server.
• .bat files: Crude but lifesaving little self-built version-control system for archiving each update to my templates, and creating complete site backups.
• Testing tool: <LINK> Bar, adds Mozilla- or Opera-like navigation buttons for prev/next, up/down to Internet Explorer.
• Validation/accessibility tool: Accessibility Toolbar Beta v0.95 (promising tool, though it seems to interfere with JavaScript on some pages).
• MySQL client: SQLyog v3.63, easy access to data & backups
• MT entry client: Ecto 1.0, an still-developing, but very promising tool.
• Graphics: Macromedia FireWorks 4, just a bit of dabbling

Plug-ins

Movable Type plug-ins I’m using, developers I’m indebted to:

• MT-Blacklist, from Jay Allen, handling comment spam.
• Compare, from Kevin Shay, increasing the reusability of template includes.
• Excerpt_words, from Stepan Riha, for displaying excerpts of comments (hacked slightly to prevent long words or URLS from busting CSS divs out of their intended boundaries).
• LastModified, from Kevin Shay, after MT 2.661’s tag refused to cooperate with me.
• MTEntryIfComments, from Stepan Riha, customizing comment and trackback handling.
• MTRelativeURL, from Stepan Riha, making nearly all of my internal links relative. (I fixed a bug in this code, as described here.)
• MTTagInvoke, from Stepan Riha, allowing MT tags to be used inside the entry body. (Vital for using the RelativeURL plug-in on links within posts.)
• NumberMunging, from Jason Tamez, adapted the convert_to_roman code to convert numbers up to 20 to words.
• OptionalRedirect, from David Raines, to preserve MT 2.64 comment author link logic.
• ShortTitle, from Dave Dribin, to create short, readable permalink URLs. Also the patch to define each page as the index in its own directory.
• SmartyPants, from John Gruber, creates typographically friendly quotes, dashes, ellipses.
• Textile 2, from Brad Choate, which implemented Dean Allen’s Textile, simplifying the writing of standards-compliant blog entries.

People and sites

The folks who have helped me get moving and whose sites I have used as tutors, examples, and tools:

• Mike Airhart, my partner, who demonstrated the ability to shake the world up a little with the Ex-Gay Watch blog.
• Stephanie Sullivan, who pushed me towards standards-compliance and CSS when I built the MM FAQ pages in mid-2003.
• Molly Holzschlag, whose CSS book gave me a jumpstart, and whose site showed the way.
• Shirley Kaiser’s Brainstorms and Raves, leading the way in explaining and implementing accessibility and readability.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS/edge and its explanation of CSS basics.
• Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility primer on the hows and whys of designing for all people.
• Jon Hicks’ demonstration by example of a clean, tabular, comment entry form.
• WASP: The Web Standards Project “buzz” blog has linked to helpful summaries and tools.
• Real Live Preacher demonstrates the power of embedding a great story in a beautiful frame.
• Pixel Perfect is the source of the photo I used to create my background image.
• Furl proved to be invaluable in tracking and sorting my links to the resources above.