This web site was written mostly by hand, using EditPlus, which is a step or seventeen above Notepad. It was coded (such as it is) and tested on PCs running Windows 95 and 2000 and IE 5.x and 6.x, but there should be
nothing in it that wouldn't run on any JavaScript-enabled browser. I have not tested it on a Mac.
There is some scripting for some of the features — most notably, links to the live or archived webcasts now appear in the appropriate places (on the front page, the upcoming schedule page, or the archive page) automagically, based (mostly) on the current date and time. This is better than having to hand-edit the static HTML files all the time. The scripting is done in
PHP, which I didn't know before I started using it. (Luckily, it's a lot like JavaScript.) No, I'm not a masochist; PHP was the only server-side scripting language available to me on my host's system.
Broadcasts and user-submitted information are stored in
MySQL, which (according to them) is "the World's Most Popular Open Source Database". PHP and MySQL seem to play particularly nicely together.
The site is hosted by
A+ Hosting. They seem nice so far.
The JumboCast logo in the upper-left hand corner was made with Adobe Illustrator 9.0, which was more software than I needed (I thought I might want to outline the characters, and so on), but worked just fine. The font for the 'JumboCast' text is Brown Display; the subtitle 'webcasting for the tufts athletics community' is in Myriad. (2/5/02: Apparently, according to
this page (which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader), although I blindly picked Myriad correctly because
I liked it, the colors are all wrong. Oh, well.)
The main text font I worked with was Georgia, which is easily downloadable for free as part of the 'TrueType core fonts for the web' on the
Microsoft Typography web site. The coffee consumed during the initial creation of the site was
Peet's Sumatra.
If, at any point during your navigation of this site, you said to yourself, "This web designer has no real clue what he or she is doing," you'd be exactly right. Enjoy!
-Steve Clay
