This website exists because of the following five things.
1. Wordpress
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
Wordpress started out its life as a blogging platform. While it’s still the greatest blogger out there, more and more people are using it to create real, non-blog looking websites. Once it’s set up (which really isn’t that hard), authors do not need to know any HTML, CSS, PHP, or any other nasty computer related technology in order to use it.
2. Zenphoto
Zenphoto is an answer to lots of calls for an online gallery solution that just makes sense. After years of bloated software that does everything and your dishes, zenphoto just shows your photos, simply. It’s got all the functionality and “features” you need, and nothing you don’t. Where the old guys put in a bunch of modules and junk, we put a lot of thought. We hope you agree with our philosopy: simpler is better.
3. Themes and Plugins
This site uses Wordpress and Zenphoto as its platform. Many other pieces of free software are available for these platforms. Here’s the list of ones active at this site:
- Cutline This a Wordpress theme created by Chris Pearson. It controls the fonts, spacing, and overall presentation of the main parts of this website.
- Page Links To This is a teeny plugin by Mark Jaquith that helps Wordpress access my Zenphoto based photo gallery.
- Viper’s Video Quicktags Allows you to insert videos easily into a Wordpress site. By Viper007Bond.
4. Open Software
This website runs solely on open source software.
5. Patience
It takes a tremendous amount of tinkering, reading, and perseverance to get a website up and running on the Internet. It’s getting easier, but you still have to have a solid understanding of:
- Hosting providers. Who do you pick? How much should you pay? What services do they offer you?
- Technology. While you no longer need to know HTML, FTP, and CSS to author something online, if you want to create your own website you still need to know it.
- Computers. They’re finicky. You need to know what to do when things go wrong.