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MTAA-RR » colophon:
How This Site Is Built
Design
The design is purposefully minimal; we want the user focused on our brilliant art and thoughts ;-) It probably looks best on a Mac since that’s what it was built with.
Web Standards
A best attempt to use W3C standards to build this site was used. However, portions of this site are dynamically-built from data contributed by more than one person making it hard to control validation on particular posts. The templates which build the site are valid XHTML transitional and CSS.
Browsers tested:
The MTAA Reference Resource is built 100% with Blosxom in dynamic-mode with lots and lots of plug-ins installed. Blosxom, written in Perl, is an open-source, light-weight, CMS/blogging system by Rael Dornfest. The plug-ins which extend Blosxom are user-contributed.
Some key plugins are:
The design is purposefully minimal; we want the user focused on our brilliant art and thoughts ;-) It probably looks best on a Mac since that’s what it was built with.
Web Standards
A best attempt to use W3C standards to build this site was used. However, portions of this site are dynamically-built from data contributed by more than one person making it hard to control validation on particular posts. The templates which build the site are valid XHTML transitional and CSS.
Browsers tested:
- Macintosh browsers
- Safari 1.25 (v125)
- Firefox 0.8
- Internet Explorer 5.2.3
- Opera 6.03 (display issues)
- Opera 7.5
- Windows browsers
- Internet Explorer 6.0
- Internet Explorer 5.5 (minor display issues)
- Internet Explorer 5.0 (minor display issues)
- Netscape Navigator 7.02
- Mozilla 1.3.1
- Opera 7.23
The MTAA Reference Resource is built 100% with Blosxom in dynamic-mode with lots and lots of plug-ins installed. Blosxom, written in Perl, is an open-source, light-weight, CMS/blogging system by Rael Dornfest. The plug-ins which extend Blosxom are user-contributed.
Some key plugins are:
- config - This plugin lets you override the default configuration of Blosxom. We use it to limit the number of stories on the front page but allow more stories in other sections.
- interpolate_fancy - This plugin is used extensively to customize different sections of the site.
- meta - Add data to some posts and hide or show it with interpolate_fancy. We add dates and venues to the on-line art section with this plugin.
- entriescache - This allows us to muck around with posts to our heart’s content and they stay in the proper order. It also speeds rendering of the site.
- breadcrumbs (slightly customized) - This builds the navigation element at the top of inner-pages. We slightly modified to remove underscores from directory names (more user-friendly).
- theme - Makes editing the look and styles very easy.
- writebackplus - Let’s folks leave comments with HTML tags.
- wikieditish - Makes it so we can edit the blog anywhere.
- seemore - Used in the texts and off-line art sections.
- hide - This keeps sections other than the news off the front page.
- postheadprefoot - Adds information about a particular section when user is in the root of that section. We use with interpolate_fancy.