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Colophon

In contrast to a book, where every copy looks the same, a web page's look and feel varies according to browser, operating system, and monitor.

Note: Some of the web pages available on Ricci Street are made by Medaille faculty and students using a variety of hardware and software.

hardware

A Windows95 PC from Gateway (200 MHz Pentium, 32 megs RAM). The few times I needed to call Gateway's help line, I received excellent service. Thus in August 1999, I  purchased another Gateway (500 MHz Pentium III, 256 megs RAM). This one uses Windows98.

software

to compose and edit pages

Jan Goyvaert's EditPad 3.3.4 and Evrsoft's 1st Page (until June 2000, I used Chami's HTML-Kit). All are free. I find Microsoft's FrontPage useful for sketching out ideas as well as for site-wide link management. I use a variety of free utilities, especially Ipswitch's WS_FTP for moving files to and from the server.

to design Ricci Street

The typeface throughout is Verdana or Arial on PCs, Helvetica on Macs, or the computer's generic sans serif when none of those is available.

The color scheme uses the 216-color browser-safe palette.

In addition to HTML code, Ricci Street uses Dynamic HTML (DHTML), for example, on the splash page. (My thanks to Eric Bosrup for the JavaScript.) The regular HTML code relies on cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript to bring consistent style and activity to the pages. I have an extreme wizbang example on Clear Light Studio's alternate home page.

The discussions, searches, polling, and some forms repy on PERL scripts.

to create and edit graphics

Jasc's Paint Shop Pro. It does everything Adobe's PhotoShop does without the bias toward print and without the high price tag.

to distribute the web pages

I use Apache (version 1.3.4) server software and PERL (version 5.00404) on the Linux (Redhat version 2.0.33) operating system. All are free and after two years, utterly reliable. The page code, scripts, style sheets, and image files sit on a server in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at Advanced Internet Technologies.

AIT boasts of their Dual OC-192 fiber optic connectivity and industrial-strength hardware: Dual OC-12 Lucent and Alcatel multiplexers, Bay switches and hubs, Cisco 7000 series routers, and ultra-fast, multi-processor RAID servers. AIT provides high speed access to the web on multiple DS-3 backbones -- AT&T, UUnet, Sprint, CWIX -- via SONET technology for maximum redundancy, fault tolerance, and load balancing. The AIT Network Operations Center monitors network performance and automatically routes IP traffic down the fastest path using BGP4 protocol. Whew!

All I know is that it's point-and-click, it's always there, it's very fast, and AIT lets me do any wizbang thing I can figure out how to do.

I have only a virtual relationship with AIT. It's as though they took me into an empty field, pounded four stakes into the ground, ran the utility lines in, and said, "Everything between the stakes is yours. No smut, no spam, and you can do whatever you want." What more could a boy ask for?

Credits and Sources

If content isn't credited, the page author or "steward" wrote it. Page stewards acknowledge themselves at the bottom of every page, usually with an email link. Direct quotations tend to be in boxes like this instead of quotation marks.

direct quotation in a box

If an image isn't credited, the page stewards either made it or believe they have permission to use it. Many of the uncredited images come from Art Today. I go there first for all my clip art needs.

Most of the JavaScript and PERL scripts came from the Web. I adapted them but left the comments about earlier contributors. The JavaScript script files are in the /images/ subdirectories and get downloaded to the users' machines (search for *.js). The PERL scripts are in *.pl, and *.cgi files that stay on the server. The only Perl script I bought was the Ultimate Bulletin Board from Infopop; it powers the Ground Zero Bistro.

Copyright

Ricci Street is © 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 by Douglas Anderson and the various page stewards under the OpenContent License so that Ricci Street remains freely accessible to all persons in perpetuity.

Copying, modifying, and distributing for your own use are welcomed and encouraged.

In 2004, I finally got around to using a Creative Commons License. If you use my material on Ricci Street, give me credit, don't charge money for it without talking to me first, and share with others as I am sharing with you.

Copyrighting something like Ricci Street, which is essentially a bitstream, is not as obvious as it may appear. Read Eben Moglen's Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright in the August 1999 issue of First Monday. He's a professor of legal history at Columbia Law School. For more background, try some of the articles at the Free Software Foundation.

Ricci Street is not sponsored by or affiliated with any owners of the specific trademarks used here, including those in hyperlinks. I have made a good faith effort to comply with the "fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law. Any copyrighted material on Ricci Street is credited, usually linked, and used in limited amounts for not-for-profit educational purposes.

The student webs at Parkside Plaza are the responsibility of the students.

If you hold the copyright or trademark to any material on Ricci Street and feel as though my use does not conform to the fair use provisions, email me and I will remove the material immediately until we resolve the issue.

Disclaimer: anything not disclaimed herein is disclaimed at They.com.