www.FistFullOfCode.com :: How it was done

Now that does sound dramatic doesn't it! Well, it was not as difficult as that makes it sound. This page is here mostly to list how things were done around the site, and to also hand out some of the code... it could be useful somewhere else.

The name came to me after watching on the Clint Eastwood dollars movies. Just love them spaghetti westerns. Anyway, the original visions was to be very KMFDM cover like. Of course having no artistic talent, I begged and pleaded for help to my partner and terrific graphics developer Brandon Dubrowsky. Along with my brother we are the management of Explosivo ITG. What came back was almost exactly what you see here for the look of the site. The concept of going with a soviet like propoganda style was a good idea.

Brandon did all of his development in Adobe Photoshop, then turned it over to me to cut up into a web page - which I did using the Gimp 2.0 (A free almost Photoshop). All of the HTML editing was done in Quanta 3.3 BE (Bleeding Edge). Much of the content was written offline using Open Office (A free MSOffice clone) until it was ready to go in.

The whole web site is generated using software we developed at Explosivo which allows for content and presentation to be combined at the last minute programmatically. What does this mean? It means that I can say every page is going to look like this, except these parts change like so if they are in this section of the web site. Still confused? Don't worry about it... its uber cool.

The site is hosted on E-Rice, which is a pretty basic and incredibly cheap hosting service ($15 / year). The do provide MySQL database, E-Mail accounts, PHP, GD2 libraries. I recommend them for personal sites. The tech support is better than another service I use that costs $25 a month also.

While most pages don't take advantage of it all of the site is done in PHP parsed pages. I figure eventually I will add in more PHP functionality, and wanted to keep the extention standardized.

The Photo Gallery is maintain in Coppermine, which is an free open source program that only requires a GD library, PHP and MySQL. I highly recommend it if your going online with more than a few digital photos. The GD 1.x library which it uses to produces thumbnails is not all that great and I recommend using ImageMagik or GD 2.x if you have that option. Personally I don't so I run a script on my desktop and upload better quality thumbnail over the originals.

The whole kit-and-koodle is run on an Apache Linux webserver. The most popular web server on the net.