Hi, I'm Dan Cunningham

Ok, for all you wanted to learn how I built this site then here you go.

This site is built using Valid XHTML and CSS. The original idea was made using Photoshop, and once I was happy with the layout I then sat down and installed WordPress, but for this you need to ensure your hosting supports PHP and MySQL services. Since I run my own Unix Dedicated Servers this wasn’t a problem for me as I installed them as needed. So make sure you have Unix Hosting with full PHP and MySQL Support.

Install WordPress

Like I mentioned before this sites backend stucture is run on the ever so popular WordPress. This makes it ever so easy to manage content as WordPress is a great free open source Content Management System released for all to use! After installing WordPress upon my server I then started with a Blank WordPress theme. Download the blank theme here. I got hold of the blank wordpress theme thanks to texto.de

Blood sweat & Tears

Once I had installed the blank theme, I then went about creating my theme locally on my machine. Once I had put enough blood and tears into the theme spending around 30% of the time taken to code the site and then another 70% of that time getting it to work in the really rubish web browser called Internet Explorer I could then integrated my XHTML/CSS Valid layout into wordpress using the Blank theme as my basic functions.

sIFR Font Replacement Method

I then decided to use sIFR Font replacement for the H1, H2, H3, & H4 tags through my site. For more infomation on sIFR then visit the sIFR Official site here. Yet again thanks to the guys involved sIFR Font Replacement meothod is free under the CC-GNU LGPL license, so anyone can use it free of charge. (Best way!)

Comments Avatars

For the avatar icons on the comment pages I have opted for the use of Gravatar. What is a gravatar i hear you say?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs? The folks at Gravatar have examples and methods for you to impliment there unique avatar system into any site you wish.

That pritty much sums up the creation of this site so far. No doubt i will change it very soon, as I’m a sod for doing that! I promise you I shall amend this page if I do something major to this site.