Hosting
Since December, 2005 this site has been hosted by Dreamhost. They offer a fine package of web-hosting, email and other services at a reasonable rate and web administration that can be as hands on as you might want it to be. It isn't every web host that allows mere customers to have full UNIX access to even their very own site, and there are times that does really matter.
Dreamhost is located in Los Angeles, CA. That would seem to be impossibly far from Northern Virginia, but distance in CyberSpace isn't measured in miles.
Their technology is UNIX® based and includes the Debian Linux OS, the Apache HTTP server, MySQL databases and other “industrial strength”, open source technologies.
Development Tools
My development machine is a PC built around an AMD processor (and overdue for a brain transplant). I am running Windows XP Pro. This machine is also collecting data from a weather station and doing machine embroidery, so it is a work-horse.
Pages on this site come from a number of sources. The original site design was by SiteDesignz. That structure has been maintained, but the contents change constantly. I write some pages from scratch modeled on existing pages. A lot of the pages come from other VADA/Nova Board and Committee members. Those pages almost never arrive as HTML.
I am using Dreamweaver 8 as my primary HTML editor. I'll be upgrading to Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 eventually, but my computer will need a brain transplant first. (My AMD processor chip doesn't do SSE-2 -- **groan**). Sometimes I reach right in and edit files with Wordpad. Ya do what you gotta do.
Originally our web pages were currently in HTML 4. All of the older pages have been converted to XHTML for a number of reasons discussed in the technical notes. The original VADA/Nova “branded” pages had file tab pull-down menus that used JavaScript to implement the menus (you can see one here). The old pages also used a small amount of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The current pages have little to no executable code in them and rely heavily on CSS.
I use a lot of different things to edit photos and assorted graphics. I've been using Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint for a long time and these the first tools I reach for. I'm also using Adobe Photoshop and I've recently started to play with Macromedia Flash 8 (part of the Studio 8 package that contained Dreamweaver 8).
Note: The Brain Transplant happened in May 2008: but in the form of a new computer (see the Blog). I am now upgraded to the Adobe CS3 Suite which means that further development will be done with the CS3 versions of Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat and Flash.
As I mentioned above, most of the pages I post originate with VADA/Nova members. They usually arrive as Microsoft Word, Excel or Publisher documents. I get many as Adobe Acrobat files as well. A website that is too loaded with these kind of documents is a slow, ponderous read and comes within a hair's breadth of becoming more of an FTP site. I use Macromedia FlashPaper to convert Microsoft Office documents to Acrobat when I believe that posting a PDF is appropriate (see technical notes). Otherwise I try to generate equivalent HTML documents. I only post MS Office documents in rare cases.
I primarily use Mozilla Firefox 2.0 for my web browsing, but I do test pages on Internet Explorer 7. I also spot check with Apple Safari (on a PC and a Mac) and Opera.
That still leaves plenty of browsers I can't test (older versions of IE or Mozilla, and anything AOL). (And please remember, I'm a volunteer).
I use Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional and the facilities in Dreamweaver to move files between my development machine and the Dreamhost web server. The Ipswitch tool can be more predictable in what it does. Dreamweaver will move a file and all of its dependencies. Sometimes that is a lot more than what you intended.
I started using Westciv Style Master 4.6 to get a handle on writing pages that use more CSS for style and layout rather than HTML <table> and <font> code. As I've gotten more comfortable with CSS I've been using it less and just going with the support for CSS in Dreamweaver . The Westciv application does a better job of rendering complex CSS, but as I've worked with CSS more, I've gotten better able to predict the things Dreamweaver doesn't get right. I'm hoping the next generation of Dreamweaver will fix these issues. In any case, it is easier to deal with one application for editing the pages than two applications that seem to squabble for supremacy.
CSS Libraries
The Westciv folks have some very nice tutorials and code examples for getting started with HTML and CSS, but probably the most useful source I found for practical code snippets and bits and pieces for making a start came from Charles Wyke-Smith’s Stylib templates from the website associated with his book Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide . He managed to strip down and de-mystify the Suckerfish Menus to the point that they became possible for me to implement. And I don't believe he ever once used the word “Suckerfish”.