Colophon
beardscratchers.com is the work of Nick Skelton; muso and fulltime web-ninja from London, England. The Compendium is an experiment in discovering and collating music metadata, and the journal covers thoughts and ideas around music and the Web.
Code & Cruft
Journal pages are authored in Strict HTML 4.01 and CSS, written to current standards and best practice. Behaviour, animation and other neat interface bits come with the aid of the MooTools javascript framework (with SlimBox) and underpinned by the Textpattern content management system.
Beardscratchers.com is developed and run under Linux on the Slicehost platform, using tools such as SciTE, Subversion and Firebug (for Firefox). Script code is compressed using the Y!UI Compressor.
Icons & Imagery
Graphics on the journal are created with Adobe Photoshop or the open-source GIMP application. beardscratchers.com makes use of a number of third-party icons, including some from the lovely Mint set by famfamfam.
PNG graphics are compressed using OptiPNG
| # | Code |
|---|
| 0001 | $ cd /export/beardscratchers.com/trunk/www/graphics |
| 0002 | $ optipng -o7 *.png |
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.
Textpattern Trickery
Lots of other great things happen thanks to the following plugins:
- rss_pluginstaller 0.1 by Rob Sable
- Automatically install and update plugins from wilshire|one.
- rss_admin_show_adv_opts 0.3 by Rob Sable
- Automatically expand article advanced options.
- aam_typogrify 0.1 by Adam Messinger
- Brings the typographical goodies of Django's Typogrify filters to Textpattern
- rss_auto_excerpt 0.5 by Rob Sable
- Automatic article excerpts
- pfd_trimwhitespace 2008-03-09 by Nick Skelton
- Trim whitespace and converts XHTML to HTML
- glx_if 0.7 by Johan Nilsson
- Some conditional tags
- zem_contact_lang 4.0.3.6 by TXP Community
- Language plug-in for Zem Contact Reborn
- zem_contact_reborn 4.0.3.20 by TXP Community
- Form mailer for Textpattern
- ako_social 0.4 by Adrian Kostrubiak
- An easy way of letting people add your posts to various social bookmarking sites.
- sed_display_code 0.5 by Stephen Dickinson
- Allows presentation of a code listing (from a file) in your articles.
- aam_if_host 0.10 by Adam Messinger
- Conditional tag to test the name of a site's host.
- rss_suparchive 0.18 by Rob Sable
- Article listings by date or by category/section. Archive menu by month or year with totals
- rss_if_search_results 0.1 by Rob Sable
- Conditional output if there are, or are not, search results on the current page.
- rsx_plugins_list 1.2 by Ramanan Sivaranjan
- Display a list of plugins currently installed.
- zem_nth 0.1 by zem
- Display content every n-th step
- ajw_comment_num 0.2 by Andrew Waer
- Allows for outputting current comment number
- asy_category_tags 0.7 by Sencer Yurdaguel
- 1) Article-Form-Tag: Shows Categories, if they are set.
2) Page-Tag: Show all categories of section that have articles in them (list)
3) Page-Tag: Show all categories of section that have articles in them (popup) - stw_category_tree 1.0.1 by Sandor Weisz
- Displays links to categories in a hierarchical structure, along with content count. Includes scads of hiding and showing options.
- pap_contact_cleaner 0.1 by tranquillo
- Prevent Spam through Zem Contact
- mem_akismet 0.4 by Michael Manfre
- Akismet/TypePad AntiSpam comment filtering for Textpattern