This page serves as an acknowledgement to those software authors who have made the creation/generation of these pages that bit easier and perhaps more fun. I put this in the “about me” section because it gives you a little more idea of the what kind of person I am by what software was used to put this collection of pages together. Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
OK, it’s really just a page of links accompanied by brief commentary but I can’t currently think of a more appropriate way to present the information here. It’ll do for the time being, unless I have some kind of brainwave. Unlikely, I know, but I live in hope.
If you aren’t using a RISC OS machine then this page is probably of only (at best) academic interest. If you want to find out more about this “RISC OS” then I recommend you take a look at RISCOS Ltd or riscos.org for general information about the operating system itself. For information concerning hardware on which you will be able to run RISC OS, try Castle Technology. You can now run RISC OS (even Adjust) on MS Windows and soon on Linux, thanks to Virtual Acorn. The A9 from Advantage Six may be worth a look when it comes out in a consumer version.
Now, the software I used:
- Zap, used to be known as “The programmer’s editor” but should be used by any and everybody. You can really dig into some of its settings and make it behave the way you want it to. Get some version of 1.46, and by http rather than ftp now. If you want to try my configuration, you can grab my !ZapUser (126K) and detached signature for it. After unzipping, put it somewhere other than Choices: (where you’ll want to keep your own one), double-click it and then quit and reload Zap to see how different my config is. Feel free to copy bits and pieces of it into your own !ZapUser. You might also want to look at the collection on the ftp site, although most of those were saved a few years ago now.
- I was using HSC 0.916, originally by
Thomas Aglassinger, and originally ported by
Nick Craig-Wood and
Sergio Monesi.
I’m now using 0.935 on OpenBSD/i386.
HSC is a developer tool for html-projects which acts as a preprocessor. I mainly use it to allow global changes to be made quickly by concentrating (almost) everything but the textual content in macros. I then use GNU make to keep the project up to date. - I was using RCS - a port of version 5.7 by erikgrnh which allowed me to keep track of the changes I make to the site and prevents anything too catastrophic happening. I now use CVS (ported by John Tytgat) and it is easier. Old versions seemed to do odd things when presented with files given /hsc name endings but the latest versions work without trouble. That said, this website is maintained using CVS on OpenBSD now.
- I extensively use SunFish, an NFS client, by Alex Waugh to access NFS on my OpenBSD machine. I can happily edit all my source using Zap. I also use it for backing up my RISC OS machines. I test my site using WebJames from that site and the browsers available on the local network.
- All PNGs on these pages were generated using Darren Salt’s Spr2Png and then further optimised using his port of pngcrush by Glenn Randers-Pehrson. Spr2Png not only converts from Sprites but also DrawFiles and Artworks files. Which is nice. And you don’t have to convert text to paths first.
- I run my pages through what used to be David Raggett’s HTML Tidy program, now at sourcefourge. I mainly use it to check for errors quickly but use its output for the final version of my pages. Now that HSC understands XHTML, tidy is less essential for sorting the pages out, and I now use the latest ports version of it in OpenBSD-current.
Browser testing of these pages will be mainly done using Oregano 2 by Oregan Networks and available from Castle/OreganoUK, NetSurf, Opera 7 and Mozilla FireFox on OpenBSD-current, and Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon and Internet Explorer on MS Windows.
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