You're curious… I can tell!

The Beardscratchers Compendium is the work of, and curated by, Nick Skelton; a muso and fulltime web-ninja from London, England. It's an experimental playground made with all the freely available data about music, and simply stems from a question of what interesting or useful things can be done with all the bits and bytes that compose the Web.

Colophon

This is where it all gets a bit technical…

Code & Cruft

The Compendium is written with current standards and best practice in mind. Pages use HTML5, where possible, and are styled using CSS. Elements of the Baseline CSS Framework have been included, and basic support for IE6 is provided by the Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS . Behaviour, animation and other neat interface bits come with the aid of the MooTools javascript framework (+ mediabox).

Visuals

The Compendium makes use of a number of third-party icons, including some from the lovely Mint set by famfamfam, some from the brilliant Pinvoke Fugue set, the excellent DryIcons Coquette and the lovely Social Media set by ~Tydlinka. PNGs are compressed using OptiPNG.

Text & Typeface

The body text of site is intended to be rendered with Lucida Grande or Lucida Sans Unicode, headings in a modern serif such as Georgia or Cambria and additional typography in Goudy Old Style. All content is encoded and served in UTF-8.

Tools

Beardscratchers.com is developed and run under Linux on the Slicehost platform (referral link), using tools such as Aptana, Subversion and Firebug. Client-side code is compressed using the YUI Compressor and Google Closure. I use Zen for project management.