WebSite Design

If you have been to my website before, you may notice that many sections/features are currently missing/not working properly. I'm in the process of re-learning how to program for the web... the RIGHT way!

Design Philosophy:

I have read alot about web usability and will try to incorporate what I have learned. My favorite thinker in this field is Jakob Nielsen, widely considered "the expert". Browse through his biweekly Alertbox articles (over 150 so far, written since June 1995). Although I believe in most of what he says, I also consider aesthetics of web design to be important. He focuses exclusively on usability and discards eye candy.

I'll be following the XHTML-1.0-Strict guidelines as well as incorporating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Web Accessibility Initiative recommendations.

	W3 XHTML 1.0 Validator - http://validator.w3.org/check/referer/
	XHTML is a port of HTML 4 to XML 1.0.

	W3 CSS Validator - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html
	CSS allows for complete separation of style from content. Therefore, I will be able to update the style of this website very easily without having to change any of the individual webpages. I'll be using CSS1 instead of CSS2 because none of the "Top 3" (Microsoft, Netscape, and Opera) browser are 100% CSS2 compliant yet.

	W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 - http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG1A-Conformance
	I'll also try to incorporate as many accessibility features as practical (atleast all Priority 1 checkpoints).

Technologies:

	Apache WebServer - http://www.apache.org/
	This webserver is running Apache, the most popular webserver.

mod_gzip - http://www.remotecommunications.com/apache/mod_gzip/

MOD-GZIP is an add-in module to Apache that transmits information from the server to the browser in a compressed format. The client browser then uncompresses the information on the fly before viewing. This has the benfit of decreasing the amount of time it takes for a visitor to view a webpages because less information is transmitted over the Internet. If a client browser doesn't support gzip (All HTTP 1.1 browsers support gzip), then the module is smart enough to not compress the information before sending it.

	PHP - http://www.php.net/
	PHP is my server-side scripting language of choice.

	MySQL - http://www.mysql.com/
	This website is dynamically generated using information stored in a MySQL database.

	mod_ssl - http://www.modssl.org/
	The private areas are secured by MOD_SSL.

	OpenSSL - http://www.openssl.org/
	The private areas are encrypted by OpenSSL.

HP-UX - http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/operating/index.html

I am hosting this site on an HP 9000 E55 server running HP-UX 11i that I picked up on eBay for a few hundred dollars. I know what your thinking, "Why is he using a proprietary UNIX OS instead of BSD or Linux?". The company I work for uses HP-UX for their mission critical application; I wanted to have a system where I could practice and not be afraid of losing my job if I accidentally logged in as root and typed rm -rf * from the root directory (WARNING: This command will delete EVERYTHING!). In fact, I have two HP 9000 systems. The other one is a C240 workstation ($225 on eBay) that I use for development. I have successfully installed Debian Linux (Woody Release) on the C240. If you are interested in installing Linux on an HP 9000 system, go to http://parisc-linux.org.