This site exists primarily for the purpose of providing me a soapbox to stand on when I have something to say. I use it to rant and rave, and to act as an online gallery of my design work. Finally, I use it as a sort of “playground” in which to experiment with new web design techniques and concepts. It should not be taken too seriously, nor should it be expected to work perfectly in every browser under the sun (in fact, I don’t even bother properly browsing-testing this site). It’s for fun and for me, so I can do that.
I believe strongly in web standards. As such, this site is coded in XHTML 1.0 Strict, with a layout and presentation done exclusively in CSS. This provides a great deal of increased accessibility and compatibility, as compared to traditional HTML table-based designs. While I do aim for this site to be valid XHTML at all time, I don’t actually test it to ensure as much. I believe the validator is a debugging tool, not a measure of greatness.
The textual content of this site is available in every possible user agent, from text based browsers to cell phones and PDAs, to the latest and greatest versions of Firefox and Safari. However, certain layout elements and details will not necessarily functional perfectly in every browser, due to varying levels of support for modern techniques. In particular, this site does not work well with Internet Explorer 6. Although I am still supporting IE6 full on sites I build for clients and for professional purposes, it’s simply not worth the extra time and effort on my personal site, now that IE7 is available.
This site takes advantage of many CSS3 properties currently only available in Apple’s Safari browser. For the best possible experience, use Safari. A Gecko-based browser, such as Firefox, will give you a reasonable experience here, as well.
This site is powered by a suite of Django applications I have written myself. Currently, this codebase is private. It’s possible it, or a subset of it, will be available publicly at some point, but it won’t be soon.
JeffCroft.com offers several RSS feeds for easy browsing and content syndication (when syndicating, please observe all copyrights). Check the homepage sidebar for current feed links.
Typography is an interest of mine, so I’ve made every effort to give this site the most beautiful type possible. The logotype is set in Cholla Unicase, a clever font from Emigre. Cholla comes in sans, slab, and unicase versions. FF DIN is the preferred typeface for the headers; users who do not have it installed will see Helvetica Neue (on Mac OS X) or Arial (on Windows). Body text is also set in Helvetica Neue/Arial.
This site is created exclusively on Apple computers, and served by Django running on Ubuntu Linux, Apache, lighttpd (for media files), Python, and MySQL. XHTML and CSS are and coded in TextMate and graphic work is done in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
This site is hosted by WebFaction, almost certainly the world’s best web host for Django applications.