silentelsie :: About

About Silentelsie Henry Bucklow Welcome to silentelsie Perhaps I should explain this site to you a little. elsie.org.uk is primarily for my friends and family - that's why most of the site is password protected. But even if you don't know who I am, please feel free to browse the parts of the site you can see. But what is the site for? It's mostly just a web presence for me, so I have a place that I can publish things. It's also a learning/testing ground for me so I can try out new ideas. So don't be suprised if it breaks! Technical details of how the site works can be found below, along with information on web browsers this site is compatible with. Happy browsing, --sffubs Compatibility This site is intended to work in all (modern) browsers. However, not all browsers interpret my code the same way, and that might lead to problems in some. The browsers listed below have been tested with my site: The following browsers support all the features of my site, and seem to work okay: Mozilla, Firefox (used to be Firebird or Phoenix), Galeon and Epiphany Opera versions 6 and 7 These browsers don't support all the features of my site, but work okay anyway: Microsoft Internet Explorer Opera 5 These browsers are usable with my site, but don't display it as intended: Konqueror Netscape 4.xx These text-based browsers also work (I suggest you visit palm.elsie.org.uk to avoid having the sidebars getting in the way): Links w3m These browsers are known not to work: Lynx - for some reason it wants to download the page instead of viewing it. I can only guess that this is a mime-type or charset bug, either in my site, or in lynx. Lots of other browsers, such as Netscape and Safari should work without problem, but are untested. There are also special versions of this site for mobile phone and palmtop browsers. elsie.org.uk strives towards meeting W3C accessibility guidelines. If you spot a specific problem regarding accessibility, please tell me. Please let me know if you do have problems accessing this site, and I will do my best to correct them. I wrote the site using a screen resolution of 1280 by 1024, so it is possible that there are pages that don't look nice at smaller resolutions. Please let me know if this happens, and I'll try and fix it. Technical Details The site is served from a mini-itx based PC, running Slackware 9.1 (based on Linux 2.4). It uses Apache HTTP Server 2.0 to serve the pages. The content is partly hand-written, and partly code-generated, using PHP to extract data from a PostgreSQL backend database. All of the code that runs this site was written my me, with the exception of the BBCode parser, which is part of the PEAR project. The site is designed to be modular, with different "areas" performing different functions, and operating independently of each other. Access to each area is controlled by an allow/deny list stored in the backend database, so different users can see a totally different site. Adding new content to the site is also very easy, as the headers, footers, titles and access control (amongst other things) are all handled automatically. This should also make for a uniform look and feel to the site. All of the content of this site is written/generated in XML, which is then translated into XHTML (or HTML 4.01, RSS, RDF or WML) using XSLT & XPath. This ensures that the visual design, structure and formatting of the site is kept seperate from the content. It also allows me to send XHTML to browsers that support it, and HTML to those that don't. The actual translation is done by mod-xslt, used as an output filter for Apache. The colours, fonts and box-layout are governed by CSS, and metadata is provided by an RDF representation of the site. Parts of the site can be syndicated via RSS, and the news area can be viewed using a WAP phone. Credits Programming: sffubs Patience: Laura Writing/testing software: VIM, Eclipse, Galeon, Opera Serving software: Apache HTTPD 2.0 on Linux 2.4 with mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, mod-xslt, php and a little perl. Contact Info If you want to contact me about this site, or anything on it, my email address is webmaster at this domain.