About site
I created my first web site at work to make my work on parallel
computing easily available to colleagues over the Web. The pages were
just short descriptions of the projects I was involved in along with
links to reports and software that could be downloaded. The pages were
hand-edited using emacs and
served by Apache on a Sun workstation.
Since then my site has been slowly growing...
The site is now developed and maintained on a laptop dual-booted
between Windows 2000 and Fedora
Linux. (But, when I’m rich and famous, the laptop will run both
Win2000 and Linux simultaneously under VMware.) In this environment, the
site is developed under Linux using the Zope web application server. Emacs is
still used to edit all the HTML code, but Zope provides a lot of
excellent features for dynamic generation of content and sharing of
source code. Pages are still served via Apache to my mozilla browser. To check my pages
are OK under Internet Explorer I currently have to boot up my noisy
old desktop system under Windows and view the pages over the
network. This is why I want VMware: so I can view pages under Linux
and Windows at the same time on the laptop.
The version of my site accessible on the Web is a static version of my
Zope site uploaded to my webspace provider from time to time. I use wget to suck out
a copy of my Zope site to disk, followed by a bunch of Perl scripts to
massage things for the Web. I also generate a CD-ROM version of the
site this way.
The present design of the site owes a lot to the design of the Zope
site. Many thanks guys! I have also stolen good ideas from many other
places on the Web. Since I write all the pages directly in HTML code
I’ve kept the layout reasonably simple; there’s no fancy graphics
here!
The most complicated part of the development process has been
getting the photographs onto the site. This seems to have taken up
months of my spare time! I got a lot of useful information off the
Web, especially from the photo.net
site.
My photographs are mainly slides which I scan in at maximum
resolution (2438dpi giving images around 2300x3500 pixels) and maximum
bit-depth (10bit RGB) using a Minolta Scan Dual film scanner and
VueScan software under
Windows. I archive the raw scanned image (about 30-40MB compressed
TIFF) to CD, before film, gamma and colour correction have been
applied. I then use VueScan to apply film correction, a gamma
correction of 2.2, and reduce the image to a bit-depth of 8. This is
followed by using Adobe
Photoshop to adjust the levels and perhaps make other
corrections. I have found it very difficult to get images that look
like the original slides! The image is then cropped in Photoshop and
reduced to half size which removes a lot of the dust marks and gives a
more manageable 4MB compressed TIFF file which is saved to disk.
All the photographs on the web site are then generated from these
final TIFF files using a Perl script. The script generates JPEG images
at a selectable number of sizes including the thumbnail size and full
size, and takes care of landscape or portrait orientation and borders
among other things.
Almost all the photo diary HTML pages are then generated dynamically by
Zope using information about individual photographs and groups of
photographs contained in a PostgreSQL database.
The maps in the photo diaries were originally produced using
ArcExplorer from ESRI with
embelishments added in Photoshop. These days I use the free GRASS GIS to produce them.
Documents
There are a number of documents on this site stored in Adobe Acrobat
format. These documents can be viewed and printed with the free Acrobat
Reader. The documents have been produced from postscript using the
free postscript viewer, Ghostscript.
Feedback
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about this site
please contact me.
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