Some info about the things that make this blog tick:

• The blog is powered by WordPress, a “state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability”, as they call it.
• The layout (or skin, or theme, or visual presentation, or blah) is my own creation.
  • Coding of the CSS and the template files was done with gedit, GNOME’s text editor. A bit like Notepad in Windows, if you can imagine Notepad on steroids.
  • The header image was vectored with Inkscape, and tweaked a bit with GIMP.
  • The main navigation images (Home, About, Archives, Links at the top) are made with GIMP, and so are the background images and the paragraph thingies () you see scattered around this place.
  • The post header images (for instance, the word Colophon above this text) are generated by a PHP script I wrote. It uses GD library functions to create the image and put text on it.
  • The font used for the header image, navigation images, header text images and paragraph thingies is URW Chancery L Medium Italic.
  • The favicon, that little icon your bookmark gets when you bookmark this site (God forbid :p) and that thing that shows up in the location bar and tab in Firefox, was converted from a PNG to a Windows icon file (.ico) by using png2ico.
• Wordpress plugins used here:
  • Akismet to kill spam comments.
  • Del.icio.us Integrator for displaying the collection of links on my links page. The links are pulled from my del.icio.us page.
  • Get Recent Comments for the list of comments on the index.
  • Markdown for post formatting convenience. I disabled it for comments though.
  • WP Audioscrobbler to get my recently played songs from my Last.fm profile and display them on the about page.
  • FeedBurner Feed Replacement to redirect feed requests to my burned feed.
  • Some other plugins made by yours truly, for… er… stuff.
• The deviation thumbnails displayed on the about page get there because of a so-called pastie, a service kindly offered by deviantART.
• The markup used for all pages should be formatted in valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the CSS code in the style sheets should validate as well. If not, I messed up and you can leave me a note.
• Finally, this site is hosted at BlueHost, and they provide an excellent service.