Hacker's guide

I could not have created this site without learning from the experiences of CS-103 students. Here are a few of the most important web-programming tools I have seen them use:

  1. CSS: After conceiving my main website story, I searched scores of CSS templates for the appropriate setting. I chose Colorimetry for its simplicity.
  2. Photoshop: I changed the colors of my template, first by using Photoshop to literally invert every JPG to its chromatic opposite. Adding blue highlights to the result gave me my basic color scheme; then with Photoshop's Eyedropper Tool I extracted the color codes of my new JPGs and fine-tuned the CSS menu tabs to match.
  3. Dreamweaver: I created most of the site using Note Tab Light for text editing, Photoshop for image editing, and Dreamweaver as nothing more than a convenient way to FTP. However, there were a couple times I used Dreamweaver for real. In particular, I created all the image rollover code (e.g., the profile picture effect on this very page) using Dreamweaver, and I used Dreamweaver to insert the Flash SWF on this page.
Other hacks of my own devising (not cribbed from CS-103 students)
  1. Favicon and Cursor: I customized the favicon (favicon)for my webpage without too much trouble. I also customized the cursor (cursor); that too is easy if you use CSS.
  2. Scanning: Most of the images in this site are paper originals that I scanned and then Photoshopped. Many are New Yorker magazine images; all of these link to the appropriate page of the NYer website.
  3. Blog Importing: For anyone (like me) who has an existing blog and wants to incorporate it into a new site, I highly recommend SimplePie. This SimplePie demo page gave me all the hints I needed to integrate my blog seamlessly into the format of this new site. (Note: SimplePie uses PHP which works on cs-people.bu.edu and most commercial webhosts but not people.bu.edu unless you are a big shot and fork over $250.)
  4. Google Maps: I was hacking around with Google Earth around the same time I was making this site. I realized that making a customized Google map like this is surprisingly easy. Get started with this tutorial. Use FTP to transfer this KML file to the webhost of your choice and then see this example of how Google Maps will obey any command you express in KML.