Colophon

beardscratchers.com is the work of Nick Skelton; muso and web-developer from London, England and currently working as a UI developer for huddle.net, which does online collaboration, document sharing and project management, amongst other cool stuff.

Code & Cruft

All pages are authored in Strict HTML 4.01 and CSS, written to current standards and best practice. Behaviour, animation and other neat interface bits come with the aid of the MooTools javascript framework (with SlimBox) and the entire site is underpinned by the Textpattern content management system.

Beardscratchers.com is developed and run on Linux, using tools such as SciTE, Subversion and Firebug (for Firefox). Script code is compressed using the Y!UI Compressor. Server-side scripting and data storage is handled by PHP5 and MySQL.

Icons & Imagery

Graphics on the site are created with Adobe Photoshop or the open-source GIMP application. beardscratchers.com makes use of a number of third-party icons, including some from the Mint set by famfamfam.

PNG graphics are compressed using OptiPNG

Text & Typeface

The body text of site is intended to be rendered with Lucida Grande or Lucida Sans Unicode, headings in a modern serif such as Georgia or Cambria and additional typography in Goudy Old Style. All content is encoded and served in UTF-8.

Textpattern Trickery

Lots of other great things happen thanks to the following plugins:

rss_admin_show_adv_opts 0.3 by Rob Sable

Automatically expand article advanced options.

aam_typogrify 0.1 by Adam Messinger

Brings the typographical goodies of Django's Typogrify filters to Textpattern

rss_auto_excerpt 0.5 by Rob Sable

Automatic article excerpts

pfd_trimwhitespace 2008-03-09 by Nick Skelton

Trim whitespace and converts XHTML to HTML

glx_if 0.7 by Johan Nilsson

Some conditional tags

zem_contact_lang 4.0.3.6 by TXP Community

Language plug-in for Zem Contact Reborn

zem_contact_reborn 4.0.3.20 by TXP Community

Form mailer for Textpattern

ako_social 0.4 by Adrian Kostrubiak

An easy way of letting people add your posts to various social bookmarking sites.

pfd_musiclibrary 2008-03-24 by Nick Skelton

Implements pfd_musicpattern as a music library browser.

pfd_library 2008-04-06 by Nick Skelton

Library Code for PFD Plugins

pfd_musicpattern 2008-04-06 by Nick Skelton

Retrieves music metadata, using MusicBrainz as the primary source.

sed_display_code 0.5 by Stephen Dickinson

Allows presentation of a code listing (from a file) in your articles.

pfd_error_logging 2008-04-19 by Nick Skelton

Simple report of PHP's recent Error Log

aam_if_host 0.10 by Adam Messinger

Conditional tag to test the name of a site's host.

pfd_scrobbler 2008-02-16 by Nick Skelton

Show a recent album chart as a list of covers

rss_suparchive 0.18 by Rob Sable

Article listings by date or by category/section. Archive menu by month or year with totals

rss_if_search_results 0.1 by Rob Sable

Conditional output if there are, or are not, search results on the current page.

pfd_scrobbler_admin 2008-02-16 by Nick Skelton

Administration for the pfd_scrobbler plugin.

rsx_plugins_list 1.2 by Ramanan Sivaranjan

Display a list of plugins currently installed.

pfd_cover_admin 2008-07-13 by Nick Skelton

Administration for the local artwork database.

zem_nth 0.1 by zem

Display content every n-th step

ajw_comment_num 0.2 by Andrew Waer

Allows for outputting current comment number

asy_category_tags 0.7 by Sencer Yurdaguel

1) Article-Form-Tag: Shows Categories, if they are set.
2) Page-Tag: Show all categories of section that have articles in them (list)
3) Page-Tag: Show all categories of section that have articles in them (popup)

stw_category_tree 1.0.1 by Sandor Weisz

Displays links to categories in a hierarchical structure, along with content count. Includes scads of hiding and showing options.