So this is my first blog! I figured that a good first blog would about this site. First of all, I have to say I am pretty pleased about how it turned out. I historically do not do well with interface design. But, I like how the look and feel ended coming together. I have to admit I cheated some by using dreamweaver.. But, I found I only used it to see what I was creating as I was creating it. It helped me see what the end product was going to look like before I was done creating it. I also used it to help resize images and tables so that it would look right. One other feature that I found useful was the "image resample" feature. This allows you to resample any image on your page to the dimensions of the img tag through just one click. Pretty damn sweet! The only thing that I am a little disappointed with is the fact that I just found out today that not all browsers support the "Copperplate Gothic Bold" font. It looks 1000 times better with that font. I am going to try to underpin "Arial Black" and see how that looks. Hopefully better.. A little about the architecture and 3rd party apps in this site: Take a look at the LINKS section for a complete list of technology that I used. This site was written and tested on my powerbook (Mac OSX 10.3) and is running on a Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Yeah I know it is old) machine. This is all possible due to the wonderful world of java. I used Tomcat 5.0.28 for my App server. Tomcat has always served me well. I tried to use the latest 5.5 version but it ended up not being compatible with blojsom. Speaking of blojsom, it turned out to be a really nice blogging app. It was a little bit of a pain to use the jsp templating system. They have a better one that I can't remember the name of included but I needed to use jsp because of own dynamic attributes. But, in the end I am happy with the way that it looks. Should be interesting how hard it will be to upgrade. I used ginp (no not gimp) for my photo gallery. Even though it is in it's early stages, this is a really nice app. Very good jsp templating (struts). It will be nice when the have some more features though like comments, etc. Once again it should be interesting trying to upgrade this one too. For the future: I am planning on adding a guestbook and chat in the near future. So stay tuned!
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