Historical Notes
This site was originally (1993-ish) created and hosted on machines belonging to the University of Toronto's Instructional and Research Computing Group (UTIRC). It very quickly migrated to the University of Toronto main web server, at URLs beginning with http://www.utoronto.ca/ian/ and http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine, at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php, lets you browse archived historical versions of these University of Toronto Web sites. Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine only goes back to 1998 (not so way back, it seems!), so pre-1998 versions of pages are now lost.
Site Colophon ?
I code this site in standard XHTML and CSS, with a smattering of JavaScript. I create and edit files using text and (X)HTML editors, mainly gvim, HTML-kit (the latter has a nice spell checker) and occasionally Nvu (which also has a spell checker). HTML-kit includes the useful HTML-tidy tool (by Dave Raggett), which both cleans up (X)HTML and checks for errors and standards compliance. I create and edit images using Paint Shop Pro 5 (Windows) and the gimp (Linux and Windows). I also use unix utilities (grep, sed, perl scripts, etc.) to batch process files: sometime on linux, but mostly on Windows XP using cygwin to emulate a unix environment.
Some other useful tools:
- PDF Creator - An open source (GPL) tool for creating PDF files: PDF Creator acts as a print driver, so you 'print' to PDF Creator and save the results as a PDF.
- Ghostscript - An open source PostScript interpreter (AFPL license for some versions, GNU GPL license for others) for the PostScript, encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and PDF languages. Needed by the preceding (PDF Creator) and next (GSview) tools
- GSview - An open source (AFPL license) tool for viewing PostScript and PDF files: is also a graphical interface for GhostScript.
- Xenu's Link Sleuth - A free (but not open source) tool for checking web site links. Fast and easy to use.
Design Notes
I am a quite hopeless graphic and layout designer, so in spring 2007 I contracted Creative Creature to update the site design and layout. This has been a great small firm to work with, and I can highly recommend them to anyone looking for help in these areas. Of course, they brought their own tools to the table. Image creation and editing was done using Adobe Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS, while all XHTML and CSS was written in TextMate and Coda on Mac OS X.
The Older Stuff
Older stuff on this site is not XHTML compliant (it may be, someday). When I started this site - in 1993 - I used the vi editor (on DEC Ultrix systems, and then SGI Irix) for all text processing, and ImageMagick for image processing. Ahh, those were the days!
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