Technology I Prefer
Valid Code
At the left of my page are buttons from W3C. W3C is the organisation that define web standards. I've taken the trouble to make sure the code on this site is valid. It is possible to produce a site that "mostly works" without making sure the code is valid, but valid code will give more consistent results.
Cascading stylesheets (CSS)
HTML is about the structure of your document. CSS provides the appearance and the layout. By using CSS to format your page, rather than building formats into the structure I can easily modify your site.
CSS Zengarden helped persuade me about the power of CSS. Take some time to explore this inspirational site.
Open Source Software
I like to host on sites running Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. This combination gives proven stability and perfomance with value for money.
Within PHP I love Smarty templating, for the separation Smarty provides between code and design. Because it uses Smarty I've used Xoops on a couple of sites. Behind the scenes I've used RosPDF, and know it works, and gives great results. My latest discovery is CakePHP — it's something I've been waiting for, and takes a lot of the hard work out of database-driven sites.
