About this site

Human

This site revolves around the Gray family.

It is intended partly for the immediate family (holding useful links etc), and partly for the wider family (photo albums for our far-flung cousins). It is also a convenient repository for odds & ends that may be of interest to others.

Technical - development

I originally developed the site using Notepad, with MS Paint for the graphics. But it's grown a bit since then!

Content Management System: Graymatic CMS, which I knocked up in Perl, just for fun. This processes content files (and an XML site structure) to generate static HTML files. This should be faster & more portable than creating the content dynamically. (For the London Mobile Christmas site, I wrote a dynamic page generation system for ASP, and found I was boxed in a corner when I needed to change hosting company in a hurry).

The HTML content that sits behind the site is all generated the old fashioned way using a text editor (Textpad).

There is some dynamic content (eg news & weather abstracts). This is generally supplied by Perl scripts running from electricrabbit.com. There's a small amount of client-side scripting using Javascript.

I finally got round to buying an up-to-date version of Paintshop Pro. This is used for graphics. And it comes bundled with a program for generating photograph albums - I nicked some of their techniques when writing the software for my own photo album pages (theirs does have some significant limitations - in particular, resizing images on the client, which leads to huge bandwidth issues).

Technical - hosting

The main Grayfamily.org.uk site is hosted commercially. Dynamic Perl content is served from electricrabbit.com, which I host from the cupboard under the stairs. The actual pictures from the photo albums also come from electricrabbit (well, they do amount to 100MB or so...).

Technical - standards

I'm trying to keep the site standards-conformant. Hence the front-page links to W3C validators for HTML 4.01, and CSS. The intention is to use relatively "pure" HTML, that doesn't depend on a particular version of browser software - hence the link to the AnyBrowser campaign.

I haven't succeeded in ensuring that the site degrades gracefully with full functionality. In particular, if you don't have Javascript enabled on your browser, the slideshows won't work, nor will the popup windows for quiz answers. If you don't allow Java applets, the crosswords won't work.