Colophon

If you are amongst my one or two devoted read­ers, you may note that from time to time this or that thing on this site doesn’t work, or you see an error mes­sage or some such thing. And from time to time the whole thing may be out of com­mis­sion (as was the case recently).

One of the reas­ons I decided to setup this blog rather than using some­thing like blog­ger, wordpress.com, etc., was to muck about with the bits and pieces from time to time. Oddly enough, I find tweak­ing PHP code, look­ing at new plu­gins and edit­ing themes to be a nice break from draft­ing 50 page mas­ter pro­cure­ment agree­ments. In fact, I would have liked to do everything from the ground up (i.e. set up the box, linux, apache, mysql, php, etc.) but these days host­ing ser­vice pro­viders make the pro­pos­i­tion of set­ting that up much less attract­ive. I figured tak­ing care of some (but not all) of the bits and pieces would sat­isfy my tweak­ing desires. And let me keep some­what acquain­ted with such things. Of course, not being an elite hacker inev­it­ably leads to things that break from time to time.

Any­way, the great (and for the most part free) soft­ware and other stuff used to cre­ate techblawg.ca:

• Word­Press — amaz­ingly great and over­all very, very cool blog­ging software
• Theme — Vigil­ance by The Theme Foundry
• MySQL - the stun­ning data­base engine that will one day take over the entire world, but which in the mean­time serves as the back-end data­base stor­ing all the bits and pieces for WordPress
• PHP — the remark­ably ver­sat­ile script­ing lan­guage that Word­Press is writ­ten in
• Plu­gins — a whole bunch of little indi­vidual bits of soft­ware that plu­gin to Word­Press to extend func­tion­al­ity in a mil­lion dif­fer­ent ways. There is a long, long, long list of dif­fer­ent plu­gins used on techblawg so for the time being I won’t be list­ing them all out here

Without the work and ded­ic­a­tion of all the folks who cre­ated the tools lis­ted above and made them freely avail­able, many blogs (indeed, many sites) would simply not be in exist­ence as it would have oth­er­wise not been prac­tical to cre­ate them. I guess this is the exact oppos­ite of the tragedy of the commons.

And of course a fair bit of tweak­ing, prod­ding, mod­ding and pluck­ing in the theme and plu­gin code by yours truly. Not that I actu­ally know what the heck I’m doing (and I’m quite happy you can’t see the code — a wee bit messy, I ima­gine..) but it all sort of hangs together, somewhat.