What is This About?
Since this entire website is about me, this particular page is not. Instead, it's about the website itself. For those who are interested, I'll mention the application and the standards I used to design it. Unless mentioned otherwise, all those applications can be downloaded and used for free, be it under the General Public License (GPL) or not.
Applications I Used
bluefish
Bluefish is a powerful and versatile web-development studio for Linux. It has support for most of today's major programming languages that are used for web-design, such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, Java, JavaScript, SQL and Perl. There's even more, just check out the website.
The GIMP
There's a lot less images on this site than there were on my old one, but I still have to mention the GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Project, and it's to Linux what Adobe Photoshop is to Windows and Macintosh: the greatest digital imaging application by far! But not having Linux shouldn't stop you from using it: GIMP is also available for Windows and MacOSX.
Gallery
Gallery is a powerful PHP-based application designed to manage a photo gallery on your own webpage. It has lots of features (dynamic image rescaling, automatic thumbnail creation, advanced commenting, fullscreen slideshow, and many more) and makes managing your gallery a dream. The only drawback is that it requires a PHP-enabled server, with quite loose permissions, on top of that.
If you want to keep up-to-date with my gallery posting, then use an RSS reader like the Sage extension for Firefox or a stand-alone application like AmphetaDesk, and point it to the Gallery RSS feed.
JAlbum
I used JAlbum to generate my personal photo gallery when I didn't have a server that supported PHP at my disposal. JAlbum is a Java-based tool that can generate HTML-galleries in many different styles from the original pictures. There are many skins available for JAlbum and you can also design one yourself, so you can achieve that flashy look for you gallery that you always wanted.
Deepest Sender
Deepest Sender is a plug-in to Mozilla and Firefox that I use to update my weblog with. It's really cool; you just open Deepest Sender, type the message you want to post and click "Post". That's all there is to it! You can also edit / delete any messages you've already posted. It was only a while after I started using Deepest Sender that I found out that the name is actually an anagram that stands for "Depressed Teen". Nice...
Standards I Obeyed
I used XHTML 1.1 and CSS to design these pages.
XHTML 1.1
XHTML is the successor of HTML. A need was felt for a strict and clean mark-up language, because through the years HTML had become sloppy. Browsers would try and interpret HTML, even though the mark-up wasn't as it strictly should be (unclosed tags and such). Later features of HTML (like frames) are not supported by older browsers, and thus some HTML pages could not be accessed by people using this older technology. Out of this confusion XHTML was born. In XHTML there's a separation between content and style. Correct formatting is enforced by an XML-conformant markup (hence XHTML). All styling is done through CSS. This makes sure that pages are correctly formatted and that they can be viewed by very old browsers. These browsers don't understand all the CSS stuff so the page looks like crap, but the pure content will be displayed, which is all the user needs anyway. On CSS-aware browsers beautiful pages (like the one you're looking at right now :-) will be rendered.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a convenient way to style a web page. In the style sheet a layout is indicated for various HTML elements. These elements can be existing HTML elements, such as hyperlinks or the page body, or custom-defined classes. In the HTML-file the elements are entered in a plain fashion (without mark-up) and formatting is achieved by linking the HTML-file to a stylesheet. Not only does this ensure the same for different pages that use a certain stylesheet, it also allows for the use of many different styles on a single webpage (in the way I have done for this website).
Confirm the Standards
Here I've linked all XHTML- and CSS-files from this website to the respective validators at w3.org. Click the links to find out if my pages validate correctly.