a.k.a. Hank's I Dig Daisy - Technical Stuff

a.k.a Hank's
I Dig Daisy
.............a Daisy Fuentes fansite...

Under the hood

The Design

The design of my humble little site is rather simple. I just wanted to make a clean, simple, and easy to navigate site that everyone can view. When I say "everyone", I mean all the different browsers out there that people use. By the comments and emails that I've received, it seems that "simple" is what people want.

Some sites are more geared towards the use of the two big browsers (Communicator and IE) with their fancy animations and such. Unfortunately, they've just excluded all the other folks that use WebTV, AOL, Sun's browser (whose name escapes me), Opera, etc.

By the way, Ms. Fuentes is a WebTV user so I made damn sure that my site was accessible to her. :)

The Graphics

The graphics on this site are all designed and created by me. God bless Photoshop! I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5 and it just keeps getting better.

That Multimedia Communications and Presentation course I took came in pretty handy. I was looking to go into that type of career, but ironically, I ended up on the technical side of things.

CGI Scripts

The CGI scripts that I used on the site are freely available on the Internet. Now when I say "freely available", I'm talkin' about free. Free to use on your site. :)

I don't know why I added the little thumbs-up rating because if I really didn't like the script, I wouldn't have used it. I guess that it's just reinforcing the fact that I really really like these scripts. :)

[Ikonboard] IkonBoard Message Board-

This is one great script. I don't think that there's any other script out there that is so easy to setup. I set this up in about 2 hours. Now keep in mind that I could have probably set this up in less time than that. I had to make the script's output look just like the rest of my site. That took me a little bit to figure out. I believe the next verion will allow you to use skins.

As for the features and description of this script, your going to have to check it out for yourself because if I try to explain it, I'll probably give you the wrong info.

[SmartCGI] Executer-

The script that I'm using from these guys is the Executer script. What this script does is allow you to call/execute external files (.txt, .cgi, .htm, etc.) and insert it into one of your pages via a JavaScript tag!

The main use for me is using it to call header and footer files. The header file contains the navigation menu on top of the pages and the footer contain the menu for the bottom of the pages.

Now, I could have gone the full CGI route and used a header and footer CGI script rather than JavaScript, but all the CGI scripts I tried all required me to change all the HTM files I'll be using this on to SHTML.

[Schlabo] Download-

I consider Schlabo's scripts as one of the best ones out there. Schlabo has an auto-configure script that will basically setup all the configurations for you. Just upload the script and run it. That's the extent of your configuration. One of the most interesting feature of Schlabo's scripts is the "plug-in" type feature. Once you've setup the main admin script and you want to add one of his other scripts, just download it from his site and upload it to yours. Re-run the auto-configure and it will automatically add the script! My explanation here isn't quite verbatim, but it's close enough. Make sure you read the instructions. You're going to have to take my word for it though on how easy it is to set this thing up.

The Schlabo script I'm using is the Download. Tracking the download of the wallpapers was something that I've wanted to do for a while. This script will also show me a top 10 list of the most popular files.

[Digits.com] Hit Counter-

This script is remotely hosted and is not installed by me. The only think I did to set this up was to sign up for an account at their site and cut and paste the code that they provide. The cool thing about the script is that it has a smart counter feature. It won't count reloads. The bad thing is that it is a little difficult to customize.

I could have setup and installed a script on my server, but I just didn't want to disturb the current count. I might do this in the future or when Digits.com decides to make their service a pay service, but in the meantime, I think I'll leave it the way it is for now.

[Guestbook] Guestbook-

This script was a script provided by my web host, but it's a free script provided by Matt xxxxx. All I had to do was enable the script in my control panel and the script is enabled and configured in my cgi-bin directory. The only other modifications I did was to give it the "I Dig Daisy" look and feel.

[Mike's World] MailMachine-

This script, when I first downloaded, was in Russian because I could not find this script anywhere. I don't even think that the link I'm providing is still "Mike's World". I keep getting redirected to some other site.

Anyway, I finally found an english version and everything's been implented. The setup of the script was pretty straight forward...no major hurdles.

The Hardware (My toys. I love toys.)

• PowerMac 9500/132 (My main workstation)

[PowerLogix] 500mHz G3 upgrade
[MacOS 9.04]
245 mb RAM
26Gb (4 SCSI drives. I had a RAID going, but I didn't like the software solution)
[IXMicro] Turbo TV (For video caps. Company is out of business.)
Artec A12 30bit Scanner (Pretty crappy. Probably works better on the PC)
[Diamond] Supra 56k modem
[GeeThree] PS2/ADB Adapter (this is a cool piece of hardware)
[Logitech] 2-button wheel mouse PS2/USB
[Iomega] 100Mb External SCSI Zip2 drive
[Iomega] 1Gb External SCSI Jazz drive
[Belkin] 4 port KVM switch (This one's at work)
Dual Monitor setup (17" Sony Multiscan and 17" Applevision 1710. This setup is great if you've got a lot of windows open. It's hard to go back to a single monitor.)
[OrangeLink] Firewire/USB Combo PCI card.

• PowerBook G3 400 "2000 Pismo" (I traded in my old PB)

12Gb IDE HD
256 mb RAM
14.1" display (Capable of dual monitor)
[IBM] 340 mb MicroDrive (Awesome technology)
[Kanguru] external PCMCIA/FireWire 12Gb IDE 2.5" HD/13Gb IDE 5.25" HD
MicroTech FireWire to SCSI converter (So I can use the crappy scanner)
[Apple] Pro Mouse (I only bought it for the novelty factor. Not very productive.)
[iMate] Universal ADB to USB Adapter (So I can use a regular Mac keyboard. I have a couple of them laying around.)

• Homemade PII 450mHz Mid-tower (mostly used for compatability testing)

[Win98SE]
128Mb RAM
10Gb IDE HD
[Creative Labs] PC/DVD (1st Gen DVD drive. Pretty old)
[Antec] Datachute 2 port PCMCIA Card Reader (This one's at work.)
Single monitor.

• Homemade PIII 450mHz Full-Tower (Not yet finished. Will soon be my server. This one's been on the back burner for some time now.)

[Windows2000 Server]
256Mb RAM
13Gb IDE HD, 9Gb Seagate UW, 10Gb Maxtor IDE on removable casing
4x CD-R SCSI
32x CDROM
[LinkSys] 10/100 8 port hub.
[Maxtor] Millenium II 8Mb PCI video card
[Iomega] 100Mb Internal Zip Drive
Old crappy 12" Packard Bell monitor

• Sun Microsystems Sparc5 Server (Currently sitting next to my future server...gathering dust. I'm planning on putting Solaris on it just to play.)

The Software

• Mac

[Adobe Photoshop 4] Undoubtedly the best raster-based program ever.
[Symantec Visual Page 1.1] WYSIWYG software that's been discontinued. Too bad. This was program was pretty good...better than what PageMill was.
[Simpletext] Apple's very simple text editor.
[Transmit] Nifty little FTP program. Has a Finder-like interface.
[Internet Explorer 4.5] Microsoft's Mac version of its popular browser. It works better on the PC.
[WebTV Viewer] Little program I use to check how well my pages appear on WebTV. There is also a PC version. This program is free.
[Netscape Communicator 4.76] Undoubtedly the best browser out there...that I've used. The reason why I like Communicator is because IE "fudges" your web pages. If there is something wrong with your coding, IE will "fudge" it and make it work. In Communicator, you will know if there's something wrong with the code because it won't display the page.

• PC

[Communicator 4.x]
[Internet Explorer 5.01]
Wordpad