An International Regatta

14 January 2005

The rat race knows no boundaries or borders. Bringing this to you is a truly international effort. Acknowledging all who have taught me along the way creates a list too long to post.

However, there are those who deserve a special note of thanks:

  • from London – Andy McCulloch is simply an amazing designer. His mastery of Textpattern and all of its underpinnings is nothing short of astounding. Andy’s site is called Branchleft. Everything you see here resulted from Andy’s (intuitive and accurate) interpretation and translation of my rambling about what I wanted.
  • from Boston – Daniel Bulli adapted a couple of javascripts that make images fade and randomly display. His site is an outstanding piece of work and a great source of knowledge when you want to understand how various design techniques were achieved.
  • from Bagnols sur Cèze – Dean Allen is the horsepower behind Textpattern. He writes Textism. When I began to search for an alternative to Movable Type, Textpattern emerged as the right choice.
  • from Dallas – Dean Allen also brings us TextDrive. The technical savvy behind TextDrive is without peer in the hosting world.
  • from Toronto – Ramanan Sivaranjan created the script that imported Movable Type entries into Textpattern. It’s an amazing piece of work and widely-used. It’s even more widely-admired!
  • from Paris – Benoit Pepermans has written plugins for Textpattern. We use two of his on this site. fla_altstyle_link and fla_style_switcher assist with the style switching duties.
  • from Sydney – Alex Shiels wrote zem_contact which provides our contact form.
  • from New York – Matthew Moss provided a plugin called mdm_if_category.
  • from Stockholm – Henrik Jönsson’s plugin is called ob1_if_section.
  • from Ohio – Rob Sable provided rss_suparchive.
  • from Saskatchewan – Scott Woods-Fehr provided swf_if_empty.
  • from San Francisco – Chris Pederick wrote a web developer plugin for Firefox. Without Firefox and Chris’s plugin, this weblog might not have come out of hibernation. No single tool or piece of information has done more to help me understand how site’s are designed and constructed.

From California, Florida and Missouri come people who have helped tremendously. Since beginning this weblog in 2002, Dane Carlson has dropped by from time to time to provide invaluable advice. Stacy Tabb of Sekimori fame provided the design for Rev. 2.0 of the Regatta. It’s a big step to leave behind her work and the traffic that results from the Sekimori and Movable Type links. Shirley Kaiser has an incredible site called Brainstorms & Raves. Shirley did a great job of teaching me an approach to learning XHTML and CSS.

Most recently, during the search for a new weblogging tool, Shelley Powers provided both the encouragement and the cautions as I evaluated WordPress. Stay tuned as Shelley continues her own project called Wordform. Last, but certainly not least, coming to you from Burr Ridge, IL, is Jenny Levine. In one of my most confused states after loading Radio in 2002, Jenny’s documentation and emails showed the way.

If I’ve missed anyone it’s due to a flawed memory and not a lack of appreciation. Support forums, emails and comments in weblog entries have been constant sources of encouragement and information. If you feel you were omitted, let us know.