dW - About

About dW

dW is a weblog programmed, designed, and written by me to catalogue my thoughts about the web, design, or whatever comes to my mind.

dW is hosted on a (dv) Dedicated-Virtual server with the fine folks at (mt) Media Temple. It’s a bit expensive, but anything’s better than what I had with Dreamhost. All posts are published with a custom log system programed by myself using PHP, SQLite, and Apache. All of the logging systems out there I have tried have been slow and overly complicated for what I needed one for, so I spent the time to program one myself. My log system is not open source and never will be. In fact it might be a perpetual work-in-progress.

I would like to thank John Gruber for his excellent Markdown concept. I do not use his code, but I do use a custom script written in PHP by myself as the ported PHP classes are less than optimized for PHP. Markdown is such a natural and great way to author for the web. The proper typography isn’t made using Gruber’s SmartyPants but a custom script of my own design more similar to WordPress’s texturize. The logo and the website’s headers use Delicious, a FREE font designed by Jos Buivenga.

About Dustin Wilson

I am a graphic artist/illustrator living in West Monroe, Louisiana. I graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design in May of 2005. I only spent four years in college as I knew from a young age I wanted major in graphic design; that’s what I did. I am a Photoshop and Illustrator expert, having spent most of my life using the programs. A certified geek, I’ve taught myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, AppleScript, and bits and pieces of other programming languages as I have found the need to learn them. I am of the belief that web standards are important; standards have made the web a better place these past few years.

In my free time I have illustrated the infrequently updated manga Dark Phantasy and have illustrated for the My Opera Nintendo log, N+.

On a daily basis I use a slew of computer programs on a Mac Pro Quad 3 Ghz:

I am an Opera evangelist so to speak. It is the program out of that list I use more than any other. It is overlooked, especially on the Macintosh. I hope I can teach and show people some of the things it can do throughout this log’s lifespan.

Web Standards

The website is an experiment with CSS and markup as well, displaying incorrectly in every browser out there. It should, however, degrade gracefully in web standards aware web browsers. The website utilizes @font-face, border-radius, rgba(), and many CSS 2 and CSS 3 selectors. To force the website to display correctly in Internet Explorer dW uses the amazing IE8.js JavaScript web standards compatibility library. If the web browser is slow when displaying with Internet Explorer use a better browser. If you can’t then put up with it. The markup is HTML 5 and would take advantage of the new elements HTML 5 provides, but Mozilla keeps me from doing so due to a bug that should have been fixed a version ago.

Media Types

Building upon an idea by Dave Shea, dW is served for multiple media types, using browser sniffing to force the appropriate styles to the device used by you. This isn’t mandatory, however. When the website is viewed on a device there is a header allowing you to choose what you wish to use. A cookie is saved and referred to by the website when loading, providing you with the appearance of your choice every time you visit dW (or when the cookie expires or it is deleted). You may also navigate the website using different media types manually: