This site has a long history. The original implementation was created (by me) in 1999 and was fairly short-lived. The design was a quick job of red and black, and it was pretty fugly. But at the time, it was running on Zope, and to this day, I don't think I've found a better system. Zope has this cool-ass object inheritance model that makes creating new pages really, really nice.

Creative Pro

Anyway, pretty quickly I couldn't look at the original design any longer, so Corrie drew up the original implementation of the Geekspiff logo, and I did the second design, based loosely on the design of Creative Pro. This iteration began on the same Zope box that I was running at Arizona State University, but when I dropped out, I decided that running my own server was too much of a pain, and I switched to virtual web hosting. And lost Zope. But gained PHP. But miss Zope.

Geekspiff #2

So, I reimplemented the site using my own custom PHP backend which was supposed to make it easy for me to update content regularly. And it was pretty easy. But I still had to hit the server, download the file that needed updating, update it, test it, move it back to the server, test it there, and clean up. Which I could do quickly enough, but it was just enough of a pain in the ass that I never did it.

And so, here's iteration number three. For this one, I didn't do the design, instead, I sponsored a contest among the guiGeeks. James Meister came up with the winning entry, and this iteration is based on it.

Original Mockup

The only problem was that his design, while very sharp, had a sort of cold, 90's dot-com techno feel to it. It lacked warmth and humanity. So I spent awhile trying to "fix" it, without much success. Finally, my art-güber friend Darcy ("Squat") took a shot, and the final design is the result.

The site is running on top of the Mambo content management system. This is my first time using it, and I'm pretty pleased with it. Of course, I had to hack the living hell out of it to get it to do what I needed… But I think it'll provide me with a good amount of flexibility that'll allow the site to grow for a bit, and hopefully, for me to integrate more content on a more regular basis.

So, here's the list of credits:

James Meister

Original site design and inspiration

Darcy Gray (who won't let me link to her stupid Live Journal site)

Site design tweaking and inspiration

Corrie Harris

Logo design and coffee

Mambo CMS

Underlying content management system

Gallery

Photo album software

PHP Scripting Language

Couldn't write the mofo without a language to write it in!

Total Choice Hosting

Web hosting providers

All information and materials are copyright 1999-2006, Jason Harris and Geekspiff
All Rights Reserved.