General

This page is mostly written by me, namely, Nathaniel Robertson.

The website originally existed as an idea in Matt Barley's head, and then as a Word document on his MacBook. It was exported as a web page, and then I took the page and recoded it cleanly (evidently Word hasn't heard about XHTML), using KompoZer at least in part. Mutual friend Matthew Hurley gave some design suggestions and contributed a small amount of code towards that.

I tweaked away at the thing and tried to add a photo gallery. At first I used Web Album Generator to make albums and then embed them on the site, but it didn't really turn out all that well and was something of a hassle. Eventually I gave up on the embedding and put them on their own similar looking pages. But then Matt Barley didn't really want so many images in an album. So what happened is we turned to Picasa Web Albums and just linked to Matt's public page. This way, Matt can easily upload and put descriptions on pictures and arrange them all he wants without bugging me, an ideal situation.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to set up an editing solution so Matt could edit the content of the pages without needing me to update stuff. I first thought I might set up Cushy CMS. It turned out to be somewhat inelegent, though, so I ended up seeking a full content mangement system.

After trying out a few CMSs, enter CMS Made Simple. The first day of seriously developing with it made me rather happy. It was fairly easy to recreate the main page. It looked like I would be able to integrate Picasa Web Albums.

Weeks later, it was getting closer to done. I of course couldn't have done it without guidance from the kind people on the interwebs, so a big thanks to them already. I have to say, the process of getting it on the web was really a pain and pretty frusterating, but it turned out to be somewhat of a simple problem in the end and now here it is. I kind of already want to make another site with it.

Thanks

To the following parties:

-The CMSms core team, of course, for making the system
-Rorik Melberg for his handy Picasa Web Album Browser module, and for providing a fix for it when I reported a display bug
-The people who gave me some answers when I was trying to make a menu without a list -blue_francis14 for reading the Smarty manual and understanding it; and so I was able to piggyback on his solution to make a similar menu
-Nadar for answering his own question and so answering mine
-Ryan Fait for the somewhat helpfullness of his Sticky Footer solution
-jh for his nice little W3C and XML buttons
-Everybody I forgot

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