Colophon

About the making of this website

Like my work itself, this website is a labor of love. Here are some details about this work. As for the love, I hope it is visible in the content and design you find here.

~ Tom Cloyd MS MA

Design

Site design and execution has been carried out exclusively by Direct Path => Design, a website design and development service for professionals in the human services professions.

Photography & Art

All images and drawings on the site are my own work. I use a Canon Powershot G-2, usually atop one of my two trusty Bogen tripods.

Software

Editors

These are the workhorses of web page and website development. Editor choice is a highly personal matter, about which their proponents tend to have passionate feelings. I do, and here are my essential tools:

• Amaya - a cross-platform web page editor/browser whose great virtue is its WYSIWYG editor interface. Quirky and not yet finished, It takes some learning, but then it's a wonderfully handy tool for writing directly ionto a web page. Freeware from the people who write the rules which run the Internet.
• jEdit - a very powerful professional source code editor. Cross-platform (Java) and open-source. It has a world of cool add-ons which I think are indispensable.
• TopStyle for Windows - a CSS editor that simply has no, repeat no, competition. Not using this editor is a very painful thought. Unfortunately, it is a Windows-only program.

Editor support

The Firefox browser (open-source) has a number of addons which offer astounding support for web page developers, speeding up and cleaning up their work. Lovely stuff.

Image editors

Gimp - the open source, free, and powerful alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Picasa - freeware from Google, this catalogs sets of images, making their management rather easy. It also offers modest but often useful image editing functionality.

Browsers

These are essential for checking the results of web page fabrication. I use three. My top choice is the Opera browser - it simply works better, quicker, and craftier than any other I've ever seen, period. Second choice is the Firefox browser - the addons it has for webmasters make it essential. They are remarkable.

Finally comes the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, which I'd gladly abandon completely if I could. Because much of the rest of the world does use it, I must also, but I'm not happy about it. Microsoft keeps trying to create a feudal "walled garden", in the world of software, while simply ignoring the messes they make for webmasters - for years at a time. The only reason they've gotten a bit better in recent months is their fierce competition from Google and Firefox. They've lost my respect, and aren't likely to get it back.

Include processor

I have written a personal "include processor", in the Ruby programming language, which enables me to gracefully manage web page element updating across a group of pages. While I don't have it available for download anywhere, I'm willing to share it with any interested party.