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Colophon

Colophon

This is a colophon, which tells you something about the more technical details of this site. It is based on the colophons of Chunshek and Photodude. Mine is rather long-winded, so you might want to grab something to drink.

A Brief History of Just a Gwai Lo

There is already page explaining the origin on the name of thise weblog, but here, a brief history. The weblog started out under a very boring name, not worth repeating here. This weblog started as many, many weblogs do: I saw a site called Blogger and wondered what the big deal was. It was primarily a personal-life weblog, with links and such interspersed. That lasted from December 2000 to about May 2003, during which this site moved to a domain (in 2001 to justagwailo.com) and independent server space. In October 2001, I moved this site to Movable Type. In April 2002, a section of this site called Filter originally written with Movable Type, took care of the just-links part of the weblog and allowed the personal site to live on its own. That section is from June 2004 to November 2005, powered by WordPress. I burned out of the personal life stuff in May 2003 and, after a brief hiatus, the main site has taken on the content of a links-commentary weblog. From May 2005 to early 2006, Just a Gwai Lo aggregated content from all the weblogs I write onto a single RSS feed. (It used to create the front page, but no longer.) That was done through the magic of PHP, MySQL, Magpie and elbow grease. Since November 2005, the front page has been powered exclusively by Drupal, now at version 5. An incomplete list of modules:

  • CCK with some add-ons
  • Views with some add-ons
  • Akismet for comment spam filtering
  • Some custom modules, including Fenchurch (an omnibus module) and Quotable, which styles external quotes

More as it develops.

Technical Details

Success in validating this site as XHTML 1.0 Transitional hinges on how vigilant its author is in writing with valid code. His vigilance varies on a day to day basis. The site makes use of CSS for formatting and positioning. There is a small amount of PHP in the backend, as well as Javascript for keeping statistics. table elements are used for table data only.

I mostly look at this site in Firefox for the Mac, so it may not always look its prettiest in IE 6 for Windows.

I don't use a WYSIWYG editor and code my HTML by hand, partly because the good web development platforms are too expensive, and also because it allows for the most flexibility. It also allows for the most typing, which can gets really tedious sometimes. <opinion type="personal">It doesn't matter how you code, as long as the site looks good and the markup is clean.</opinion> That said, this site is updated through the the best PHP CMS there is.

Non-English words (except for onomatopoeia and proper names) are italicized. An example would be raison d'etre and ni hao (which, respectively, are "reason for being" in French and "hello" in Mandarin Chinese). Emphasis (either a slight pause, louder when spoken, or both) are in bold. An example would be "It wasn't what he said, but rather what she said." Words or phrases that I wish be de-emphasized are written like this. Titles of print publications (be they magazines, newpapers, books, etc.), movies and music CDs are also italicized (this marks a departure from my previous practice, which was to underline), even within links if it has an online presence. An example is The National Post (but not, however, Slate, the online-only political affairs and American culture magazine). Every effort has been made to wrap acronyms in the acronym tag, but there are some acronyms (like RSS) that stand for different things, depending on whom you ask, and therefore are not wrapped in acronym.

Comments

Starting again in January of 2005, I've enabled comments on almost every post. Thanks to the Akismet module (and the Akismet spam filtering web service), few comments require approval, but some slip through. Only those that feature unsolicited advertisements for products that usually involve male genitalia in some fashion or that proselytize the sport of tilted brim kings (i.e. poker) will not see the light of day.

<!-- Old text, no longer reflecting the truth, but kept for historical reasons:

Comments aren't enabled on current posts. This
is intentional. I no longer care what you think. Actually, that's not true: you can still email me and expect a response, which would indicate to you that your opinion, right or wrong, matters. So there's no real point in saying what the rules are. The revolution will not be archived: I can delete a post for whatever reason I choose. You object? Well, I pay for the domain and hosting (see next section), so my rules.

-->

Hosting

This site is hosted by Bryght Hosting, owned by currently my employer, Raincity Studios. Formerly this site was hosted by Vervehosting, which I recommend. They're American, which not only doesn't matter but shouldn't, because they're cheap and their tech support totally rocks. All my domains (I've lost count), except any .ca domains, were registered at NameCheap. Again, American, but cheap and has every feature I need.

Spelling

Every effort is made to use the Canadian spelling of words. Yes, that's right: superfluous U's! This means that I sometimes misspell American organization names (the last word in "Department of Defense" is commonly misspelled with a C instead of an S). Cornerstone's Canadian English Page is a useful guide to how I spell words. Inevitably, you will come across a poorly spelled word, and I'd thank you if you pointed it out gently. And privately.

Some animals may have been harmed during the production of this website, but luckily the SPCA didn't notice. That's a joke. Get it? Funny? Ha ha?

Disclaimer

This page may contain wild inaccuracies. They will be corrected at my leisure. I fully intend to forget to do so. Everything I write is an accurate reflection of how I felt at the time.