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About This Website

If you'd like to report a problem about this website or make a comment, please contact me at idiotprogrammerREMOVETHIS@fastmailbox.net. You can also read a short biographical sketch of Robert Nagle, the idiotprogrammer or or view my resume

I run this website from an php-enabled linux apache server in my Austin apartment. I built the Athlon 1.2 gig machine with my own hands and I also run an SGI/XFS kernel of Linux. I've played around with some Mysql applications, mostly recently with phpBB, a pretty incredible bulletin board. I have plans to deploy a content management system in the near future, probably something like Zope or postnuke or movable type (or all three!).

I write only XHTML code, and I take the trouble to validate my style sheets and xhtml and also to check my pages for web accessibility and compliance with Section 508 accessibility guidelines. I have essentially abolished the use of tables to position my content, using positioning with css2 instead. Some good sources for "table-less design" include thenoodleincident.com, Eric Costello's glish.com, and for the truly out there, Eric Meyer's CSS/Edge. The hacks to correct the IE 5.5/6.0 box problems are pretty ugly, but these sites provide good browser-neutral style sheets for any format you could possibly want. The only drawback to table-less design is lack of support for browsers that don't support CSS 2, but aside from seeing the "link description text" all the time on the home page, users of older browsers won't face any real impediments viewing content. I strongly support the Web Standards Initiative For people who haven't upgraded to a browser that supports well-established Internet standards, I'll mention a quote from Mr. Spock, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

Most of these pages look great on a 1024 x 768 screen resolution on a 17 inch monitor on any browser with CSS2 support. I've also tested at 800x600 resolution, where everything is quite readable, although the screen is a bit crowded. Here is a summary of the browsers I have tested this site with:

I don't use very fancy tools to produce this site. My main concern has been platform neutrality. I wrote the template code and the stylesheets mainly with XEMACS (PSGML Mode), and 1st Page 2000 (Windows only). Also, for wysiwig editing using templates, I usually cut and paste into Mozilla Composer. I also have been known to use Morphon's CSS Editor and Ulead's Photo Impact for graphics. This may sound strange, but I have a copy of Macromedia Flash (horray for academic pricing!), and I'm actually eager to play around with it.

For dynamic dns service and port forwarding, there is no better service than www.dyndns.org. Dyndns has a cool service for people whose ISP block port 80. It allows requests to the top level domain (i.e., www.idiotprogrammer.com ) to be forwarded to another port number (in my case port 81). Also, I use the excellent (and free)Internet Seer to monitor web server performance. Also, I use (and recommend) the excellent and cheap Orangatango VirtualBrowser to get past my LAN firewall.

My web server also hosts the domain for www.nadamagazine.com, an online literary magazine I hope to launch soon. Because of the uncertainty surrounding my web hosting method, I've also created an idiotprogrammer pointer page which will probably show up high on search results whenever you search for "robert nagle" or "idiotprogrammer." It will contain the most recent link to the idiotprogrammer web page as well as any mirrors.

I recently hosted my www.imaginaryplanet.net at www.tera-byte.com. So far I recommend them fairly highly. For $10 a month, you have the ability to run php, cgi scripts and a mysql database.

Finally, let me mention my support for www.blogger.com , which powers my weblog (or its mirror , a great and easy method of web publishing and Eric Costello's dhtml-enabled blogger template which I shamelessly stole. The needs of the many...