About the belles lettres that is MacStansbury.com

This was to be a much simpler colophon. It was to be just a couple of lines, telling you, the viewer, about the make-up of the site. Then I got a hold of Wikipedia, and started seeing how all the cool sites have details, details, and more details. What started as a simple, three-line entry became a challenge. Then again, it wouldn't be a Colophon if it wasn't packed with detail. You need a good Colophon if you're thinking of releasing a website onto the internet. I mean, the whole world can see what's on there. No person in their right mind would want an inferior Colophon.

The look of the site

This is produced using WordPress and the internets. You too can get K2, with all it's loving attachments, the thing that makes the drivel written in the posts look so good. Most of what looks cool here is from the hard work of the people who produced the template. Graphics are created with Photoshop and Illustrator, stolen from stuff I found on the afore-mentioned internets. The "design" of the site was put together with a combination of Adobe GoLive and TextWrangler. The quotation marks meaning it is less designed and more randomly placed in hopes that it won't catch your browser on fire.* The site is a combination of black and white. Lots of black, even more white. It seems there's a ton of black and white here, and that's understandable. I love black and white. Black and white rock. This would be the paragraph proving that whole "inferior Colophon" I mentioned earlier. There are quite a few grays mixed in here. I'm not sure how they got in, but they will be dealt with. There are also rogue yellows and reds, thought they've so far evaded capture. Know this, all non-black-and-white objects will meet strong, swift justice, at the hands of #000000 and #FFFFFF. Well, you can get away with using #000 and #fff now.

That's not the normal K2 footer

While working with WordPress templates, you'll find out something quickly: most of them don't fill the entire screen. That's not a bad thing, it's just that if you're just using the very top of the page, people will think you've done something wrong. You haven't, but people thing empty = bad. With the default setup of K2, there are bars and widgets and all sort of nonsense that allow you to keep the length of the page longer than the standard browser window. However, if you'll notice, I don't. In fact, I went to great effort to remove most of what was up there in order to create a cleaner look, sacrificing the content on the side. That said, it leaves short entries with virtually nothing on the page. To alleviate that, I stole borrowed the idea from Hemingway and added a lot of content in a binary, ternary, quadrate fashion. It's all the rage these days.

A note about the logo

Back in 2003, I decided to make a simple logo until I could produce a quality, professional-looking logo. 10 minutes in Illustrator, created just to fill space. "Gone when I get something good," I said. Three years later I can't bear to part with it. In fact, it's the basis of all that is this site. From the Gadget font (that you can see if you have a Macintosh (Mac) computer with Gadget installed), to the blacks and whites. Even the whitespace comes from that logo. They (whoever they are) don't have a term for blackspace, but if they did, I'd say that came from the logo, too.

Standards, or the lack thereof

Normally, when one writes about one's Colophon, one enters the data from one's validations of one's RSS feeds and CSS files. That's just too much work for me. I...am...lazy. Then again, were you to stumble upon this site, and run some sort of validator, you might, or might not, find that the site is valid. If you do, huzzah! If not, shame on me for not being valid, I should know better. My question, though, is this: what if the standards change? Remember the BLINK tag? Remember when you had to write tags IN ALL CAPS? Sure, that was never a good idea, but it was the thing to do 10 years ago. Now, not so much. In a world where we can't get two different browsers to render the same page the same way, I'm going to spend my time making sure Internet Explorer users can actually read the page, rather than making sure I'm using some syntax that will degrade peacefully over time. If everything works for the greater good, I'm all for it. If not, feel free to argue with me some more.

Under the hood

TextDrive hasn't got around to deleting my account yet, serving pages with PHP 5.something and MySQL 4.something.something. If you really want to know the exact numbers, I'll refer you to the log something something something. This should pretty much tell you that I've no idea what any of any of that means. Just make it work, TextDrive. Danke. The files are sent to the web using Cyberduck, edited with GoLive and TextWrangler. The posts themselves are minced together with Safari OmniWeb, occasionally saved in TextEdit, powered by the feeble brain of one John Stansbury. All but one of these is cared for, longingly, by it's owner. One of them spends most of its nights crying itself to sleep with a pillow stained with run-off of the nightly bowl of ice cream. There are a variety of plugins that make the magic happen, a wonderful list that changes frequently, so I'll include them in another page.

You really have absolutely no clue about how to put together a working Colophon, do you?

In a word? No. Then again, I don't really think anybody does. Here, look at John Gruber's Colophon. Short, sweet, to the point, and only one cuss-word. Okay, so he uses it twice, but still, just the one. Gets to the point, and quickly. Then, there's Jeffery Harrell's Colophon. Extremely detailed, informative, and got them neat graphics the kids like these days. And long. Did I mention it's long? Lots of detail in there. So, which one is right? Tons of details, or just a few links? Sort of like my rant on standards, isn't it? Here's some more: About Jason and kottke.org isn't really a Colophon, or a colophon, but is the traditional "About" page. But, lookie there! Colophon-y kind of things, all over the place. Does that make it a Colophon by default? Sorry to get so defensive, but your question caught me off-guard. Making a Colophon ain't no joke you know. And it may look like I just threw some .htm files together in FrontPage and called it a day, but no! All these pages are served dynamically. They may look static, but there's action going on all the time. That's just how I roll.

I had no idea you felt so strongly about this

Well, you would too if you spent all night thinking of witty ways to say "I'z gots a website, and it's got them widgets and whatnots" while trying to sound like you've actually graduated from college. And you know what those widgets are and what the whatnots do.

So, what you're basically saying is, Colophoning ain't easy?

No. No respectable person would ever say that. Get out. *In case your browser does catch on fire, we disavow any responsibility, and by reading this statement, you agree to waive any rights you might have had. Please don't sue me.

status: published
lastmod: '2007-01-01T04:30:37.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
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