Site Information | Author Information | Contact Information

Site Information

Purpose

Most of the personal websites have now been filled with blogs, which mainly syndicate other content and publish details and thoughts about personal lives. Such content is useful for close friends and relatives, but contributes little back to the internet community as information to help others. This site, is not just a blog. It will also not be updated that frequently. I will post information here which I mostly write originally after a good deal of self research. I cannot say that everyone could gain by reading this site, but at least I will only publish data when I have something useful to say.

Scope

Most content on this site is related to computers and the internet, but I will also occasionally deviate to un-related concepts. I am a jack of several trades, but like to explore every field in greater depth, being usually out of curiosity. I document what I have learnt so that it acts as a future reference for me. Hence, the content here can be considered as useful bridging material between the beginner and intermediate/ advanced levels.

Technical Information

This site runs on a Apache Server, using PHP as the scripting engine and mySQL as the database. The site is currently being hosted on a free host, but will hopefully be moving to a more permanent location soon. I have long term plans to run this site off my own web server through a cable modem or DSL connection. The images are handled by the GD2 image manipulation library, also installed on the server. The site uses caching for improved performance and Gzip Compression to reduce bandwidth usage.

Design

This site is being run on Drupal version 6.1. Drupal is a flexible CMS, usually used for larger community oriented sites as well. The site appearance was designed by editing the slash theme. 1st Page 2000 and Nvu were used for editing and coding, wherever necessary. The following Drupal modules are being used on this site:

Atom | Feedback | Image | Poormanscron | Printer Friendly Pages | Porter-Stemmer

Design Goals

The idea for this site is to keep it as small and 'light' as possible to minimize bandwidth usage and loading/rendering times. To this effect, a theme has been designed with little use of graphics. The entire mouse over effects for the links is done through CSS. Images are used only where the text needs visual description. Most images have alternate text data so that even text browsers like lynx can navigate the site. Images, usually in .png format are always optimized for size before uploading. PHP Caching has also been enabled to store pre executed PHP scripts in memory.

I aim to keep the hierarchy of the site's content relevant and easy to navigate. This is achieved through the taxonomy module. Regardless of how many future articles are posted, the taxonomy is scalable offering unlimited nesting. The site's taxonomy can be completely knocked own and rebuilt at any stage without affecting the actual articles themselves.

The availability of the inbuilt search function also allows for any article to be located easily.

The entire site is interlinked makes it easy for crawlers to index. No page is left isolated from the rest of the site's taxonomy. Advanced searching is possible through external search engines using the "site:URL" function.

Advertisements are confined to text based ads at most. I will avoid popups at all costs, while banners may be used if they suit the site design. All content on this remains free to read and use. For this reason, it will be licenced under one of the free text licences (e.g. GNU FDL or Creative Commons). If the information is used elsewhere, I would appreciate a kind mention as "Source : icekin - http://icekin.f2o.org". However, I certainly won't hunt people down with copyscape even if they fail to give me credit.

Viewability

The site can be viewed with any browser and is completely frameless. I have a plan to make it tableless in the future so that it may be viewed from any handheld device as well

Hardware

I did all my site work on an i386 desktop called "dragonfly". It runs on a Biostar P4TSV Main board with an Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor and 512 MB Dual Channel DDR 333 RAM. I've recently sold it to a friend and reverted back to "condor", my older machine which is a 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird with 512 MB SDRAM. condor's mainboard died a while back so a new machine, "eland" has also been added recently. Its a 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 EM64T with 512 MB DDR2 RAM. I might be adding pictures of my machines here sometime.

Author Information

I started out with making basic HTML pages like everyone else. Now I'm doing that occasionally while making dynamic pages more often. All dynamic technologies used are Open Source like Apache for the Web server, PHP for scripting language and mySQL or PostGRE for the database. I also use the following CMS where possible to simplify the work

Civicspace - for large and medium sized sites which need to work out of the box. I've also done Mambo/ Joomla

Drupal - for smaller sites like this one

Wordpress - especially for Blogs. Have also done some Nucleus CMS

MediaWiki - The easiest and best option for Wikis

I have also experimented with a number of other CMS including Angeline, PHP Nuke, Post Nuke, Limbo, Xoops etc., the actual list being quite long. I find the above to be the best for their respective jobs so far. I am also learning Plone and looking at N/X Open Source CMS as an option for enterprise development.

I practice web development and design on a part time basis and I have designed sites and portals for several organizations and close friends. If you plan to make a site for yourself or your company and would like to keep the cost low, consider going open source. You can contact me if you need free consultancy. I will give a honest picture as far as I can deduce.

Etc

I generally use the nick 'icekin' everywhere on forums. If you find a link back from one of those profiles to this site, then you can confirm that its me. I've also provided links here to some of my online profiles. Where unavailable, I use the nick 'icekinroot'. Don't expect to find many contributions in these profiles; I am quite silent in an online community. I read all these sites regularly, but only participate in discussions very occasionally, mainly to ask questions.

My interests: DeviantART | Last.fm | Simmery | Brainguppy | Postcrossing | Geocaching | Flickr

My Social Network: hi5 | Friendster | Yahoo 360 | Yahoo | Blogger

Computers, Tech: Drupal | f2o Forums | Launchpad | Ars Technica | Slashdot

News Networks:Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit | Shoutwire | Kuro5hin

Activities:Taking IT Global | Online Journalism Review | National Novel Writing Month

My Geek Code

Version: 3.1

GE dpu s--:+ a-- C++>$ UB+>++++ P+>+++ L+>++++ E--- W+++>$ N+ o? K- w>--- O-- M- !V- PS+ PE Y+ PGP>++ !t !5 !X R* tv- b+>+++ DI !D G+ e>++$ h* r--* !y+

Contacting the Author

The contact form is the only way to initially contact me. I do this to avoid spam, which we all get a lot of, despite the filters. Once I reply to your email, you can directly send me mails. I can also be found hanging out occasionally on DALnet and Freenode under the nick 'icekin'. You can leave me memos using Memoserv.