About the site

Under the hood

If it isn’t plain already, this site uses Wordpress, the open-source CMS that I can’t say enough about. One of the best things about Wordpress is its potential for customization, and I’d like to think I’ve taken advantage of that. First up, I’m using Kyle Neath’s Hemingway theme, modified to display asides on the front page by following The Design Canopy’s excellent tutorial. Oh, and I’m using my very own pullquotes method. Typographically, my logo displays in Gill Sans for that nice midcentury fee.

The other side to Wordpress customizability, of course, is plugins. I’ve got a lot running:

• 404 Notifier - Generates a nice RSS feed of what’s broken on my site
• Akismet - Comes standard with Wordpress 2, and prevents comment spam
• Breadcrumb - Generates that neat "danray.org >> About the site" navigation element above
• CSS Naked Day - Does away with my stylesheet every April 5 to celebrate this littleknown holiday
• Diagnosis - Just generates a handy debugging page with Wordpress statistics and server constants
• Feedsmith - Takes the work out of using Feedburner to manage your feeds
• Old Post Alert - Adds a message to the comment area of posts older than a year and a half warning that no one’s really paying attention to them anymore
• Search Pages - Does what it says on the tin: pages show up in internal search results
• Ubernyms - Automatically generates acronym tags to let me sprinkle references to HLS, IL, and XML throughout my posts without losing anybody
• wp-cache - Serves cached pages to reduce server strain… just in case 

 

Hosting

This whole web-contraption is hosted by A Small Orange. I’ve been nothing but impressed with this company, and their packages and service are unbeatable at their price level. Yes, they’re paying me to say that (even though it’s true!), but there’s also something in it for you for reading it. If you sign up with ASO, you can use either of these coupon codes, just for Electric Counterpoint readers, to save some cash:

• ecfivebucks — $5 off any hosting package
• ecfifteenpercent — 15% off any hosting package

 

History

danray.org v1.0

Web design (and coding, and upkeep, and…) has always been a summertime thing for me, since, as a student, that’s the only time I’ve got to work on personal projects for any length of time. Back in the summer of 2005, I registered my first domains and put up a static page at danray.org. My largest reason for creating the first version of this site was, truth be told, to justify snagging my domain name. But, you know, it’s always good to have a web presence, right? This page used a PHP script to display the last few posts on Electric Counterpoint (then still running Blogger and hosted at blogspot.com) as an index, and featured a few "about me"-style pages. I loved the color scheme and the layout, though, and in fact I’ve tried to carry over the look of the page to Electric Counterpoint’s current incarnation. Fun fact: the broken-up photo toward the bottom left is one I snapped of the Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and was meant as a placeholder until I worked out a script to randomly display others. Needless to say, I never got around to it.

Electric Counterpoint v1.0

The original blog to bear this name, but not my first. I first started blogging in 2002, and that blog’s no longer online for the same reasons that you haven’t published all your highschool-aged ramblings for the world to see. Anyway, Electric Counterpoint originally lived at blogspot.com, and used the Blogger engine.