About This Website

This is my home to talk about and post links to websites about games, media, technology, web development, politics, Madison, and life in general. It also features tutorials on various computer and web development topics and a portfolio of lighting, graphic, and web design work I have done.

Technical Stuff

This website is run using Movable Type 4 and hosted on Media Temple. It uses the Action Steams Plugin by Mark Paschal, MTCollate Plugin by Stepan Riha, Key Values Plugin by Brad Choate, Blog Janitor by Mark Carey, and Compare Plugin by Kevin Shay to do a bunch of fancy behind the scenes things. The fonts used on this site are Cry Kitty, Dirty Headline, the first sans-serif your browser can find on your computer, and a tad of my own handwriting. The design is made with (almost) valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0. It was created entirely by myself, from scratch. I use FeedBurner to manage my RSS Feeds.

History

This website has gone through a lot of changes, which is why it doesn't include as much content as it should for being around for 10 years. It's more of an experimental website, where I test technologies on my own website before I apply them to others.

It all started when I was surfing around the internet one day, using good old Netscape 3.0, and came across a site with "This page hosted by GeoCities. Get your own Free Home Page" written across the bottom. Wow! Free! Plus they offered an entire 2mb of space back then. That was more than a floppy disk! I signed up, and using their basic HTML editor I created this page (v1.0), which launched on February 22nd, 1998. A version with frames (v2.0) followed shortly after.

Then as technology developed, so did my page, with the biggest collection of useless little things that made my site all cluttered. It looked just like this (v3.0) in 1999.

After deciding that it was virtually impossible to find content under that clutter, I did a total redesign for the year 2000 (v4.0).

Then on January 12th, 2001, I launched a slightly new site (v5.0) on a new pay host, HalfPriceHosting, with my very own domain name. I was sick of Yahoo's changes to GeoCities, and I wanted support of server-side scripting languages such as Perl and ASP. Through the years, the page eventually ended up looking like this (v6.0) as it became more blog-like.

The only problem was the difficulty to manually update all the pages. I decided to move my content to the PHP Nuke content management system, but that required a change of host. On December 1st, 2003 I moved to HostRocket, and launched my new site (v7.0). The insecurities in PHP Nuke quickly lead to defacement, so I re-did the site using Word Press (v8.0).

December of 2005 I changed hosts once again, and this time to MediaTemple. I had several issues with HostRocket's (lack of) security, and their hosting packages no longer offered the services I needed for the prices I was looking for. After a few months work, I also once again changed content management systems from WordPress to MovableType (v9.0). MT doesn't mess with the HTML code in my tutorials and offers a better template system that makes my site easier to maintain.

In May 2006, I launched a brand new design for the first time (v10.0) which featured valid CSS and XHTML 1.1.

Quickly bored with that layout, in July 2007, I launched the design you are looking at now. (v11.0)

I never have and never will use pop-up advertising.

Linking

Feel free to link to my site. Below is a blog button that you can use.
<a href="http://www.teshack.com/"><img src="http://www.teshack.com/images/about/teshack.gif" style="border: 0px" alt="The Entertainment Shack" /></a>