The Construction of this Web Site

The design of this site was influenced by, not copied from, www.robertgraham.com's site, which unfortunately is now available only through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.  

This website was built using hand-coded HTML m4 macros, the vi editor, the sed stream editor, the PHP programming language, and make on an Apple computer that was running the Mac OS X operating system which is a Mach skeleton with a BSD Unix skin with many GNU components from the Free Software Foundation and others from the Open Source movement.  

The m4 macro processor made it possible to easily maintain a uniform appearance for the entire site because each page was assembled from a common set of low-level HTML components, i.e., the macros.   Once those components were written, the construction of a page was greatly simplified and expedited because all that was needed was to select the correct low-level building blocks to assemble a uniform, good looking page skeleton with working menus.   Of course, each page's text was written independently from other pages' text.  

The use of a specific editor -- in this case vi -- is a religious decision because it is a matter of individual preference.   However, the sed stream editor is the ideal tool to easily trim away unwanted side effects from some macro expansions.  

The PHP language was used because of its implementation as an Apache web server module to improve performance over the combination of CGI with perl.  

Although the mod_perl Apache module existed at the time that this website was built, it was not used because at the start of development it was not present in both the development environment and the web hosting company's server although the hosting company would have made it available for an additional charge.   Another reason why mod_perl was not used is that perl is both ugly and too easily made illegible.  

Manuel Lemos's excellent PHP classes were used in the registration and contact forms:  His forms class is used to layout and process the registration and contact forms, his email address validation class is used to validate email addresses typed by visitors to this website into the registration and contact forms, and his email message class is used to send class registration confirmations and notifications to our Club's officers that there has been a registration for a class or an attempt to contact us.  

To automatically generate the timestamps at the bottom of every page, a one-line program was written to do that in the object oriented language Ruby, because in Ruby everything is truly an object.  

Although this site is a small one, its pages have enough links that it's a chore to spot broken links, but that job was easily automated with a short Bash shell script that relies on wget to do all the hard work.  

This complete website is generated by running a Makefile after each set of changes.   make automatically regenerates only the pages that are affected by changes to underlying, low-level, HTML, components.  

As this site grew and the number of source files increased, maintaining the Makefile became a very important, and error prone, process until it was automated by a special purpose dependency file generator that was written in the Ruby programming language to process all the component files to generate lists of dependencies that are included automatically in the Makefile by GNU make.  

A lowest common denominator kind of HTML was used for all the pages except for the very rudimentary use of cascading style sheets.  

The internal structure of this site's pages owes much to Dave Ragget's excellent introduction to CSS, Big Baer's CSS tutorial for wrapping text around images, and Eric A.  Meyer's book Cascading Style Sheets.  

Richard Zickerman used a digital camera to take the photographs that appear on this site, and they were processed with Adobe Photoshop by Bill del Solar.  

The website's logo is the paw print from the front left paw of a one-year-old English Cocker Spaniel that was rotated, colored, drop shadowed, and resized in Photoshop.  

The slide show uses only HTML, and requires neither JavaScript nor cookies.  

Parts of this website were developed while staying at Rose and John Perry's dog-friendly Inn at Crotched Mountain in Francestown, NH.  Both John and Rose made helpful suggestions that influenced what you see on this website.