Topic  Info  Who?  This site was created and is maintained by Sam Swett (email). You may have come here via Sam Swett's vanity site, and you might like to visit my business The Swett Group.  How?  I use a very simple system called Tab-Delimited Data Delivery System (TDDDS). If you laughed, you got the joke (yes, I know it's esoteric). For those who don't get the joke: this is an elaborate way of saying that I'm using one of the most basic information formats there is. Tab-delimited files are almost universally accepted for simple information exchange. I can create the files in also any program, such as Excel, any database, etc. But I just use BBEdit (a text editor). Most tabular data you see on this site just exists as these simple text files, which are then marked up using HTML at the time that you request them. The navigation links at the top of each page are automatically included using PHP. All I do to create a page is clone an existing page's structure and change the contents only. The photo thumbnail galleries are generated on-the-fly by TDDDS (source code available). All I do is throw the thumbnails, full-size images, and captions on the server and the rest is taken care of. In the future I may incorporate more features into the gallery displays. If I make a lot of changes to the site, I use Fetch's "Mirror Folder" feature to synchronize the website with my local copy.  When?  I started on this design you see here on 2002-09-25. It was largely in place and working by 09-27. This evolved from what I learned after creating spherule.com, which lives on as a host for the mirrors and file-blog sections.  Why?  I was tired of a structure that required not only thoughtful input, but also required thought and concentration each time a page was added or changed. Quite a high energy was required to overcome the site's update-inertia. This new system and site are much "lighter-weight" while still providing all the (minimal!) functionality I want. Hopefully, when I inevitably tire of the plex.us design, I can create a new design without having to re-think the entire site. Just changing a few elements could have a drastic effect on how the site "feels."