How This Site Was Built
This is actually my fourth run at creating a website. The first one was done in Emacs and was your basic "hello, world" sort of page. I then was inspired to go a bit further and bought Microsoft's FrontPage (boo, hiss). I made a generic little homepage with that, and actually put together "Dave's Music Site," which later exploded as one of the first popular MP3 sites on the Net. (more about that here)

My third version I had learned enough about HTML to develop my own theme in Emacs (Emacs is a Unix-based text editor) focusing on blue tables and no graphics, since I had no access to graphics tools and most graphics on the net are superfluous, anyhow. I had had visions of a multimedia center of sorts, but that kind of thing generally only turns out well if you're a multimedia guru with hundreds of hours to spare. That not being me, I bailed on it and decided instead to write some half-interesting content about myself and technology. I put my essays up. It did pretty well, but the layout was very dark.

So I was inspired to do this layout, much lighter than the old one, while maintaining the blue tables theme. The information is all dynamically assembled with PHP3 to make publishing easy, and is laid out in a compact and accessible fashion. Click page source at the bottom of the righthand navigation bar on any page on this site (except for the front page, whose "view source" link is at the bottom!) to see its PHP3 source.

The site is running on Apache with the PHP3 module installed, all hosted on my own little Linux box that I keep at school. Linux rocks.