Full Disclosure
Sat, 29 Aug 2009
On occasion, I will mention a commercial product or a business, either here on my blog, or via my Twitter account. (Follow me on Twitter.) I might post a link, or I may mention a product or business. On these occasions, rest assured that I am not receiving payment or any sort of compensation for these links or reviews.
I will never accept any advertising at spacecoastweb.org, nor will my Twitter account be used to deliver sponsored messages.
The writings found on this blog, and on my Twitter account, are my own personal opinions. I do not publish any sponsored posts. I do not participate in affiliate programs, paid link schemes, or otherwise accept any compensation which might compromise the integrity of what I write.
If I choose to review or link a product or business, it is because I feel that I have received full value and good service as an ordinary consumer. In a time when good customer service is increasingly hard to find, and when shoddy merchandise is accepted as the norm, businesses that excel in providing consistent good service and quality products deserve commendation. When I am impressed by the excellent quality of the products or services I am rendered, I will often reward that exceptionalism by noting it publicly.
Conversely, if a product or service fails my expectations, I may warn others of my bad experience, so they might make a more informed decision. I don’t do this out of spite or malice, but from concern that others might unwisely spend hard-earned money on something that will disappoint.
If any conflict of interest should arise, I will inform readers of the conflict and fully disclose any potential bias that might color my opinion.
» Link: / about / Full Disclosure
Colophon
Wed, 01 Jan 2003
Platforms and software used in the development of this site:
- site5
- This is where I currently buy domain hosting. They provide reasonably prompt service and fairly reliable uptime. The features are great and they seem to know what web developers need.
- Linux
- The server's OS. This site is penguin-powered.
- Apache
- The web server.
- PERL
- PERL is an interpreted programming language. It's an old camel that can still spit.
- Blosxom - Unofficial Blosxom User Group
- It's the zen of blogging with prehistoric tools. Blosxom is big in Japan. And here's another Blosxom site from Japan. Download the latest versions here: Blosxom on SourceForge. For completeness, here is Blosxom's Wikipedia entry.
- Blosxom Flavours - Unofficial Blosxom Flavour Repository
- Flavours are like templates, but tastier. Mostly, I use my own recipes, based upon the work of others. The site is rendered dynamically, so each page is cooked fresh.
- Text files
- Entries are just text files with some words, mark-up tags and meta information. Easy. Blosxom calls them stories.
- Blosxom Plugins - Unofficial Blosxom Plugin Repository
- Configure a plugin, if needed, then drop it in. (Maybe I'm understating the process, but not by much.)
- Blosxom Plugin: author
- Sets a default author. - Not yet implemented.
- Blosxom Plugin: blogroll*
- Turns a generic opml file into a blogroll. *Patched to provide extra styling.
- Blosxom Plugin: breadcrumbs*
- Leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. *Patched to provide an extensionless, canonical uri.
- Blosxom Plugin: categorytree
- Provides a list of categories and sub-categories.
- Blosxom Plugin: directorybrowse*
- This provides a path-style browsable permalink. *Patched to provide an extensionless, canonical uri.
- Blosxom Plugin: entries_cache_meta*
- Caches a bunch of junk, which speeds up the rendering and populates meta variables earlier in the process. *With this patch applied.
- Blosxom Plugin: extensionless
- No more ugly .html extensions on my pages.
- Blosxom Plugin: feedback
- Akismet-protected, configurable comment and trackback solution.
- Blosxom Plugin: file
- Makes a file's contents available as a variable for use in a flavour.
- Blosxom Plugin: find
- A search function plugin. - Not yet implemented.
- Blosxom Plugin: flavourdir
- Gives me a place to keep my flavours.
- Blosxom Plugin: gentime
- Tells me how long it takes to generate a page.
- Blosxom Plugin: geotagger*
- Supplies maplinks and getagging to my pages, and georss for my feeds: Used for location-based blogging. *Rewritten to use entries_cache_meta, so that meta-location variables in the stories are available in the head.flavour template. - Under active development.
- Blosxom Plugin: gzip
- For browsers that support gzip compression, speeds page delivery and reduces bandwidth.
- Blosxom Plugin: hide
- Hides some files and folders.
- Blosxom Plugin: interpolate_fancy
- Interpolation allows conditional statements which help customize the blog's output.
- Blosxom Plugin: lastmodified2
- Provides last modified times and correct http response headers. Here's the detail: The lastmodified2 plugin
- Blosxom Plugin: meta
- Gives me the ability to pass values to other plugins, using hidden metadata within my stories. Handy.
- Blosxom Plugin: prettycategory
- Not all that necessary at present, but I might use it anyway.
- Blosxom Plugin: slashredir
- Helps provide an extensionless, canonical uri. See: Enforcing proper use of trailing slashes. - Disabled at present, due to a redirect problem stemming from a conflict with my current .htaccess rewrite rules.
- Blosxom Plugin: storystate
- I'm using this for some of the variables it populates.
- Blosxom Plugin: storytitle
- Provides a better page title on individual story views.
- Blosxom Plugin: timezone
- Corrects timezone differences between me and my server.
- Blosxom Plugin: twitter*
- Brings my twitter stream to my blog. (Follow spacecoastweb on twitter.) Special thanks to maswan for Fixing Blosxom Plugin: Twitter. *Patched to provide extra styling.
- Blosxom Plugin: wikieditishvc
- Provides a password-protected, version-control, editing interface.
- Blosxom Plugin: wikiwordish
- Allows for simple, wiki style links in markup, which are converted to html anchor links in page views.
- Blosxom Plugin: meta_youtube
- An experimental, unfinished plugin of my own creation. Deals with the ugly embed code that YouTube creates, substituting a more elegant solution.
- blueprintcss
- Blueprint is a CSS framework which provides browser resets, basic typography, and a grid-based system to aid web development.
- SWFObject
- A javascript flash object handler, used here to display YouTube videos without the dreaded embed code.
- NOTEPAD++
- A very useful text editor.
- Fasticon.com
- Slick-looking free icons.
- Silk Icons - famfamfam.com
- The best set of free icons.
- Wufoo
- Provides a web-based contact form for the site.
Contact Info for David Harper
Wed, 01 Jan 2003
I can be reached via email: [dave AT spacecoastweb.org]
You can follow my status updates via twitter: spacecoastweb
Alternatively, you could fill out a contact form.
» Link: / about / Contact Info for David Harper