Colophon

col-o-phon (kol'e fon') n 1. a publisher's distinctive emblem. 2. an inscription at the end of a book or manuscript, used esp. in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, giving the title or subject of the work, its author, the name of the printer or publisher, and the date and place of publication.

-The Random House Dictionary, Revised Edition

Jimsun's site design results from many influences. First of all is the requirement that every page be easily readable and properly rendered on whatever browser a visitor may be using.
Every page at Jimsun is checked against the W3C HTML Validation Service, Web Site Garage, CAST:Bobby, and others. No page is published that does not obtain acceptable ratings from these testing services.
The books listed on the Jim's Reference Library page under On HTML and Web Development are our references and style guides, particularly Siegel's book: Creating Killer Web Sites.

It was all originally put together on a Sun SparcStation IPX workstation running SunSoft's Solaris 2 Unix operating system. From about mid-1999, and for the next ten years or so, Jimsun was a Sun Sparc AXi-based system, fabricated by Rave Computer, running Sun Solaris 7. As of January, 2010, Jimsun is now a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC, running Ubuntu Linux.
With one exception, all HTML content is generated with Netscape Navigator Gold ver. 3.0 and the Unix vi text editor. The initial page layout and rough "concepting" are done with the former. The latter is used for subsequent modification, fine-tuning, removal and replacement of "Netscape-isms", and so-on. The exception is our "Favorite Sites" page. That is automatically generated from our bookmarks files by a Perl script.
All original graphic art is created with The GIMP. Many thanks to the people who have made this great application possible--and freely available!
During development, and as part of the testing process, new work is checked locally along with the rest of the site collection by accessing it through the Apache Web server we have running on our workstation.

Some of the graphics on Jimsun have been "lifted" from sites that kindly offer to share their graphics work with others. Foremost among those has been the DCS WWW Image Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science. Our thanks. All graphics are used with permission.

Our Internet Service Provider is MegaPath, with whom we are quite pleased.

And finally: the generous assistance we receive from our friends by way of their critiquing our efforts and suggesting improvements is greatly appreciated.

Comments or Questions?

Created: Aug 1, 1998, Last updated: Mar. 3, 2010