by Derek—2005.01.01 @ 1821
DerekandMelissa.com is written and produced by, well, Derek and Melissa. Although, Derek seems to spend the most time tweaking the site.
My computer at home is a 20" iMac, and it is there I find peace. There is little peace on a Windows machine. Big Brother is watching. The Apple Macintosh platform provides such a fluid, cohesive, and natural system software, it makes web develoment and design a breeze. Besides the most current OSX operating system, I use the following on a regular basis to update this site:
DerekandMelissa.com has been hosted on a FreeBSD server by my good friend for a few years now. It is truly to him that I owe so much of what is here. I use the remarkable MovableType for content management, along with the excellent text formatter, markdown.
Currently, the Photo album is generated using a set of programs I wrote using Perl. Additional scripting comes through PHP, which is getting more and more attention these days.
When I first started web design, I was afraid of the code. However, over time as I came to understand HTML, I realized how poorly my WYSIWYG editor produced HTML and how simply I could actually do it. Today I do all my coding by hand using BBEdit and Emacs. I try to adhere to XHTML and CSS standards for layout and design.
If all works well, this website should look great in any browser, WAP phone, printer, and speech device. I think that's pretty cool.