The About Page

About the Webmaster

Neil Scudder is a web developer with a broad range of digital media experience, currently residing in the Commercial Drive neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He has worked in Toronto, London (UK) and Vancouver over the past 13 years.

When he's not staring into the computer, Neil plays an Epiphone guitar on a Marshall amp, listens to his proud and fancy stereo and makes thousands upon thousands of cups of espresso on a Gaggia Coffee machine.

This Web site

A (largely) XHTML / CSS compliant web site with two main goals: 1) A fully liquid design (without being distorted by aspect ratio) for optimal zooming on high-resolution monitors; 2) Structured content for accurate and easily indexed search engine listings. Other clear benefits of this approach are very fast page loading times, and great readability (for example when holding the CTRL key and zooming with the mouse wheel).

The 'Flash Video' files are an interruption to an otherwise light and text-based design, and do nothing to help with search engine indexing. But they're cool.

The Spectrum Graphic

The coloured boxes (visible to the right, unless you're using the 'small' stylesheet) are each DIV elements with a hover colour, providing the change when your mouse hovers over top one of them. [Internet Explorer 5 and 6 do not have proper CSS support, so the DIV:hover element does not work.] A piece of the XHTML code:

<div class="F A058"> </div>
<div class="F A059"> </div>
<div class="F A060"> </div>
...

The 'Calc' spreadsheet program (in OpenOffice.org) is used to manage the long array of colours in the XHTML markup and CSS. Colours which I have to enter by hand until me and Calc can learn to think in 24-bit base-sixteen hexadecimel. A sample of the stylesheet code:

.F {float:left; width:2em; height:2em; margin: 0; }
div.F:hover {text-decoration:none; background: #FFFFFF}
.A001 {background: #FF6666}.A002 {background: #FF3333}
...

The Server-Side Scripting

The head tag for each page is dynamically generated from a single file, included using php. The title of each page is set after determining what page you're looking at:

<?php
$path = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];
if ( $path == "/index.html" ) { echo "<title>neilscudder.com - resume</title>"; }
...

The menu is also a PHP server-side include, which dynamically applies the "current" CSS identifier to the respective menu item. This is the first menu item:

<div <?php if ( $path == "/index.html" ) {echo "id=\"current\"";}?> class="menu">
<a href="index.html">Resumé </a>
</div>
...

The Googlebot

Google already had my site indexed as XHTML, with HTML for a file extension, and I wanted to keep the existing filenames while adding PHP support. [As of Nov 07 this is borken - oops.] After some fruitless fruiting around with the HTACCESS file, I discovered that I just had to use the Cpanel (control panel) at my ISP to set up an Apache Handler, to treat files with the extension HTML as PHP. This worked great (although it applies to the entire server!) especially considering that legacy pages with HTML still in their name continued to work fine, and validate.