Links

Hackwater's RPG pages

I moved my gaming pages to a subdomain, as they didn't really fit into the look of the rest of the page. The content should be up soon.

Boston College

I went there. I liked it.

7th Sea home page

My favorite role-playing game. They've decided to lick Wizards of the Coast's boots and have converted to d20, but I still play the One True 7th Sea: d10!

Mozilla

Internet Explorer has countless vulnerabilities. So do Outlook and Outlook Express. I use Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for browsing and e-mail, respectively, and I highly recommend them. Tabbed browsing, security, and they are open source.

Textpad

It's what I like to use for editing my web pages on Windows. It has decent syntax support. On Linux, I use Kate.

Linux/Web Server Links

Linux Kernels

My web server runs Linux. Get your kernel source here. After staying with the 2.4 kernels for their greater stability, I've moved to the more cutting edge 2.6 kernels, which I feel are pretty solid.

Debian Linux

This is the Linux distribution I use. Excellent package management system, but I found I had no patience for the outdated packages available for the stable version, so I use Sarge, their testing distribution. So far, it has been pretty stable.

Slackware Linux

This was the first Linux distro I tried. I like its emphasis on stability, security, and leanness. Unfortunately, as a Linux newbie, it was too difficult to use.

Knoppix

Knoppix is a live Linux distribution. You boot from the Knoppix CD, and it runs a customized Debian distro right off the CD. It's great for trying out Linux on a PC without actually touching the PC's hard drive. It comes with tons of software for you to play around with and help you decide if Linux is the OS for you.

Apache Web Server

One of the most popular web servers. It's free, relatively secure, and easy to set up. I use Apache 2 because it seems easier to secure than 1.3.

MySQL

MySQL is a database frequently used as the backend to a PHP-based content management system. It's relatively easy to use, it's fast, and it's free (with some caveats that don't affect me; check their license for said caveats).

PHP

PHP is a server-side scripting language that looks a bit like C and Perl, and can be embedded into HTML to create dynamic, flexible pages. I use it to control some of the content and the navigation on this site. I've been using PHP 5 for a while now, and I've had to patch a few programs that expect PHP 4, so I've gotten a lot of educational value as well as the functional value I was expecting.

Python

Python is an object-oriented interpreted scripting language, similar to TCL and Perl. I had to modify the Python script that checks my server's IP address and updates it on Zoneedit to get it communicate with my router.

Perl

Perl is Not Just Another Scripting Language. Though occasionally arcane, it excels at data manipulation.

Zoneedit

Zoneedit provides free dynamic DNS service for low-traffic zones (i.e., domains), even for top-level domains. This is ideal for home web servers, and if you find your traffic demands more commercial solutions, they offer those as well.

DynDNS.org

DynDNS.org provides dynamic DNS service similar to that of Zoneedit's. Their main drawback is that they do not offer free top-level domain DNS service; instead, you have to set up domain forwarding (for example, example.org would have to forward users to example.dyndns.org for the name to resolve properly).

HTML/CSS Links

W3C

A good place to read the specification for various web standards. I like XHTML strict, although it can be challenging to keep to that standard.

HTML Dog

Great HTML and CSS tutorials.

Layout Reservoir

It's where I got started with CSS layouts.

A List Apart

It's where I got started with CSS menus.

Random Interest

When will your time be up?

Join the team! Don't drink the Kool-aid.

I know; free speech is so 20^th century...