Technical Information about the Widget Web Site
Tools and Services Used
Here are some general bits of information about this web site. As a codriver and computer geek, I thought other codrivers and computer geeks might be interested.
- The Widget Rally Team's web site is hosted by Shults Dot Com in Mission Viejo, CA.
- The logo was designed by Ed Hotchkiss at www.digitalartclassics.com
- All the pages these days are written and validated using CSE HTML Validator to insure compliance with W3C standards and cross-browser compatibility. The product provides lots of macro capabilities as well, thus making it easier to bring everything together with a consistent look and feel.
- Some batch processing is done with XyWrite III+, a powerful text editor from the DOS days. In the early days of the web site (pre-2000), the pages were written with with XyWrite as well.
- Certain optimization tools are written in LotusScript, one of several programming languages supported by IBM's Lotus Notes.
- After securing web-usage rights for photos from the many photographers that support our sport, thumbnails and intermediate sized images are optimized for web display with Easy Thumbnails, (FREE software!) which also generates the web pages based on our own templates. In earlier days we used Thumber, which captures embedded comments as well as other image attributes, but we prefer our current tool for its flexibility and batch capabilities.
- A wonderful little tool called ColorPic helps us match up colors when working on graphics. They offer a lot of other great tools that make your job easier.
- Files are uploaded to the web site using TurboFTP. The synchronization component makes it easy to transfer only the necessary files, as well as deleting orphaned files that are no longer part of the site. We used to use WS_FTP Professional from Ipswitch, but after a hardware crash, no amount of effort would allow WS_FTP to be reinstalled.
- Xenu Link Check is occasionally used to explore the entire site for broken links.
- The Widget site is maintained on two separate computers. FileSync is a wonderful tool for keeping the computers synchronized so that both computers contain identical data. They also offer FTPSync, another FTP file synchronizer.
- Rally videos are edited with Adobe Premiere Elements. Occasionally Nero is used, especially when working with PAL formats, but it doesn't offer the level of control I want from the keyboard, nor does Roxio's Easy Creator product.
- Until Ed designed the new logo, I created graphical page headers using the Cool Text tool on the web.
![[Widget Home]](./images/promo/wrt-website-700x59.jpg "Widget Home")
![[Navigator Image Map]](./images/promo/wrt-nav-700x59.jpg)