This website is actually running software called “Wordpress“. It’s free, it runs on a language called php and a database called mysql. I’m hosting it through a crowd called mphosting but I’m running a copy on my own machine for development. So this software is a content management system. Means I can put up a post or a page quickly. It’s all pretty basic stuff.

So why didn’t I write my own stuff from scratch? Well, look I am a control freak, but I figured why am I trying to reinvent the wheel. Wordpress won’t do exactly what I was looking for in a website, but it’s close enough.

And here’s where the control freak aspect of me does take over – the style. Wordpress is the nuts and bolts. The look and feel, that’s all me. All my work, my ideas, my creativity.

Well, almost.

Credit goes to the guys who did sandbox, Scott Allan Wallick and Andy Skelton. It’s hard to explain what sandbox is to people who don’t know CSS. Basically, these guys built a nice level foundation.

And I have to credit Eric Meyer. He’s a CSS author and in his book “Eric Meyer on CSS” is where I first saw his “Complexspiral”. It’s brilliant. He’s the guy who came up with the whole scroll-the-text-moves-the-background-stays this theme is based on.

So what did I do?

I showed this to someone here and his response was “Yeah, I saw something like that one Myspace”. Every time I do something cool on the web, there’s always people who say “yah saw it before.” To me, that’s like when my father takes someone on a tour of the house he built and they saw “Yah, I’ve seen houses before.” It’s the fact that it’s a product of my hands, it’s my work that I put into it that I’m showing you.

Okay, so sure, I did get a lot of help from Wallick, Skelton and Meyer. So maybe it’s more like the Adirondack chairs my dad builds from a template he copied from a kit.

They’re still nice chairs.

Sunset at Brooks Beach