About This Web Site
How I built and designed this web site over the years, using more and more technology advances.
Current Web Site Design – Nov 2019 to Present
- Migrated and converted content to a WordPress based publishing platform.
- Hosted by DreamHost.
- WordPress Theme by GeneratePress.
- Pixelmator Image Editor
A very sophisticated image editor for the Mac that I used to create and edit graphic text, shapes and photos. - BBEdit by Bare Bones Software
An excellent professional code and text editor that I use for HTML and CSS code editing.
Web Site Design – 2013 to 2019
I built my web site’s current design with the following software, tools and techniques.
- Apple MacBook running OS X v10.14 Mojave.
- Hype Professional v3.6x by Tumult – HTML5 Web Page Design Tool
- I used Hype to redesign the entire web site to take full advantage of HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript and be able to easily add animation and special effects anywhere in the site, with ease. Hype is an excellent HTML5 web content design tool for the Mac that can create animations and interactive content in pure standards based HTML5 without requiring Flash or any other plugins.
- Apple’s Xcode v9.x Software Development Toolkit
I used Xcode for editing HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript and other code related files. - Pixelmator Image Editor
A very sophisticated image editor for the Mac that I used to create and edit graphic text, shapes and photos.
Web Site Design – 2011 to 2013
The previous site design used from June 2011 to Feb 2013 was done with the following software, tools and techniques.
- Apple’s iWeb v3 Web Page Editor
I created a custom iWeb theme for my site by reverse engineering the iWeb Theme code – this is not a documented or officially supported capability so it requires a fari amount of technical skills and patience. iWeb is a simple web page tool but was effective when combined with your own custom coding and other development tools, such as the ones below.
Although iWeb has not had a major update since 2009 with iLife 09, it still offered a easy to use tool that worked fine for a small web site like mine. However, as time past iWeb began to show it’s age as HTML 5 and new browser versions far surpassed it’s ability to keep up. So as HTML 5 tech matured, I re-designed the site with a pure HTML 5 web page design tool – Hype by Tumult. - Additional tools used include: Apple’s Xcode v3, Pixelmator v1.6 and Hype v1.0, all running on an Apple MacBook Pro.
- Pushing the envelope a bit:
In 2011 the code generated by iWeb and Hype that produced the animation and special effects like shadows and transparency, was still a bit leading edge. Although Safari v5, Firefox v4 and Chrome v12 seem to handle this fairly sophisticated code, Microsoft Internet Explorer seemed to have some issues – even the latest IE at that time, IE v9. So I had to limit the animation and effects because of browser limitations at the time.
And Before That…
The site’s designs before 2011 went through many revisions and some of the following tools were used to build them:
- IBM Lotus Domino Designer, Domino Server and Notes.
- Flash animation and effects were built with Adobe LiveMotion, a Flash development tool that Adobe created before acquired MacroMedia and Flash tools along with them.
- Adobe PhotoShop.
- MacroMedia’s DreamWeaver, Fireworks and Freehand.