About Aurora- Technical features
| Outside help | Foundation software | Web Standards |
Outside help
Something this big obviously wasn't wholly my own fault, nor the originator's. Many of the techniques used here originated from other designers / programmers, as well as much input by the early players.
- The random image generator is from Dan Benjamin, via A list Apart
- The navigation text-as-buttons via CSS, as well as many years of leadnig by example came from Zeldman.
- The website is based on Mike Phyle's original, with a lot of mods by
the current webmaster, Jake Gibson (
).
Foundation software
We freely use open source, free, and cheap material available on the net. Hey - they work. Really well.
- The Wiki is the same that the Wikipedia is based on, Media Wiki.
- The board is a free version of the Invision Power Board, at InvisionFree. It's ad-supported. They don't bother me - let me know if they get offensive. Perhaps even more important, we don't have to administer the guts of the board. Yay!
- I host the parts I do have to administer with HostPC. They're not free, but they're affordable, and well-run. That's all the stuff on the worldspinner.net domain.
Web Standards
Aurora's website uses web standards suggested by the W3C. The main idea behind this is to separate content (XHTML) and Layout (CSS) to make it easier for anyone using any method of browsing the internet to access our information. Mike Phyle adhered quite closely to these standards. Any mistakes in form or structure can be assumed to be Jake's fault. Jake accepts all correction and criticism, and even acts upon some.
Other features on the site use PHP and a MySQL database.
All of these technologies are Open-Source.
