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Any largish site uses a lot of different techniques to hold it together. Here I'll briefly describe what I use to keep robgray.com functioning. Graphics Photos are sized and generally manipulated with Photoshop then exported to JPG files with as high a quality as possible but with a general limit of about 70k per image with some (most notably the panoramas) up to 150k. Buttons and other general graphics are also created in Photoshop. Some drawings are created with CorelDRAW then exported to GIF format and either used directly or further manipulated with Photoshop. The background image was created with Reptile. All images, photos and graphics are created by me. Site building The page layout and general site managment is done using Dreamweaver. After unsuccessfully trying to use three products (Frontpage, GoLive and Dreamweaver) to reliably detect changed/new/deleted files and sync my computer with the files on the ISP's server, I gave up and wrote my own. It's called siteman and it does reliably detect all changes to my site over any period (months sometimes) and performs the FTP actions required to synchronise my computer with the files on the server.
Siteman is a Visual Basic (VB) program running on an Access database. In theory you could do this all in Access but I find Access a total pain to program with. Using VB for the interface and Access just as a database is a very useful combination and I have done a lot of work in this manner over the years. Programming The interactive parts of this site (puzzles, menus, custom galleries etc) are written in Javascript. Early on in the project much of the code was obtained from free script sites like The JavaScript Source, then modified or even totally re-written. These days I just write my own code from scratch. The guestbook, secure ordering form, credit card details form, sample photo form, and other pages use a combination of Javascript in the forms and Perl or PHP code running on the server. In the case of the guestbook I did use a free service for a while but it was unreliable, so, as usual I wound up writing my own. I don't know if being a programmer is a blessing or a curse :-) Many pages are now automatically generated by my picman photo managment program (see below). For example there are over 200 pages in the categories galleries alone, to keep these up to date manually would be a nightmare. PHP is now used for the data intensive dynamic pages, such as the FOTOfinder which allows the searching of a photo database. Photo management I manage my images with a program I wrote called picman. Like siteman this is a VB application running on an Access database. With picman I can do all the normal image management things, like sort on keywords, set image attributes etc. I can also generate web pages, about 4000 of the pages on this site are automatically generated from my database by picman.
(168k) Search facility The search facilities are provided by freefind.com. This is a pretty good utility, it's certainly at the right price, free. The free version however does place advertising blurb on the results pages. To remove this you can subscribe to the service but I can't afford to.
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