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about this site

why? just why?

well, this site is here for a number of reasons, none of them great. i guess the main reason is that i'm a web developer by profession, so i think it's only right that i have a site. i've been involved with recruitment at two of my jobs, and i've always been dubious about hiring someone for a developers job when he or she doesn't have a personal site.

following on from that, the site is a bit of a showcase, hopefully showing the types of things that i can do. for example, the content management system (cms) for the home page is written in php and mysql (more on that below), the tool on the browse posts page is written using ajax, i've used xslt on the rss page to make the xml browser friendly and to add an explanation of rss, and of course the whole site uses xhtml 1.0 strict markup and css for presentation. if i think of any more ways to crowbar another technology into the site, i assure you i will.

"powered by my code"?

i always find it a bit strange when i look at other developer's sites - which contain a blog like feature - and they have, for example, 'powered by blogger', 'powered by wordpress', etc, and they're trying to sell themselves to prospective clients or employers. i'm not trying to take anything away from those tools, as they are great, but you wouldn't have a web designer's site saying 'designed by someone else'.

i built the blog tool for this site using php and mysql. i'm not for one second suggesting that it's a greater app than blogger or wordpress or whatever, but it does work. i can add, edit and delete posts, it spits out the rss feed, creates a permalink page, etc. i plan to add a comments tool to the posts soon, and then make it get me a gin and tonic at 6pm every evening. and i get to say 'powered by my code'.

explain the icons

the icons on the left explain a few things about the technology, standards and accessibility features used throughout this site, and some allow users to test or validate my stuff.

w3c - xhtml 1.0
this tells you that this site is built using markup that follows the rules laid out by the world wide web consortium (w3c), in it's xhtml 1.0 specification. clicking on this icon will validate my code against their rules, and tell you whether i've passed or failed.
w3c - css
this icon is another concerning the w3c, telling you that i've used css for presentation. again, if you click on this icon you will validate my site's css against the css specifications laid down by the w3c.
disable css
this one will disable the css in the page that you were viewing at the time. if i've done my job properly, the site should work exactly as it did with css. only look a lot worse. to re-enable the css, click on the 'css enable' icon that you'll now see on the page, or navigate to another page within this site.
wai - aaa
the web accessibility initiative (wai) is an arm of the w3c that offers strategies, guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities. this site has been built in such a way that all priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints are satisfied. as a result, oneplayer's conformance level is "triple-a". clicking on this icon will test that "triple-a" standard. for more information visit the wai, or - for information specific to oneplayer - read my accessibility statement.
rss - 2.0
2.0 is the version of rss that this site uses. for more information on rss, and it's versions, take a look at wikipedia.
php powered
as stated above, this icon confirms that the site was built using the brilliant scripting language, php.

i do re-validate my code from time to time, but things can be missed. i would appreciate it if you could let me know if you use any of the icons above to validate my site and find that it fails.

thanks for coming