Making the Site

This web site was originally designed by Adrienne Rodgers of Six Foot Creative. The underlying structure of the pages was then rewritten, and graphics re-rendered by , who also maintains and updates the site.

This site was completely written using BBEdit, a text editing system that makes hand-coding HTML and scripts easy. BBEdit's powerful "bbinclude" mechanism lets us automatically create and update the page headers, menus and footers, and its "grep"-style pattern matching and replacement makes sitewide changes a breeze.

The site menus were created using Fireworks, which allowed us to create a common template and easily make individual menu images. Screen shots were made using Snapz Pro X, and scaled and cleaned up with Photoshop (which was also used to scale, crop, rotate, and otherwise manipulate many other images).

Serving the Site

Our web site runs on an XServe. It uses Mac OS X Server, which lets us easily create multiple "virtual servers" and manage the site easily. Mac OS X Server uses powerful open-source software like the Apache web server and Mailman mailing-list manager. (Thanks to its open-source nature, we were able to easily make modifications to Mailman which gave us more control over the look of the mailing list pages.) Our technical support knowledge base was created with WebObjects.

Protecting the Site

And last but not least, we use our own Kick-off! and PowerKey Pro to keep our servers up and running, even when no one's in the office!