Colophon

From Merriam-Webster:

Pronunciation: [kol-uh-fon, -fuhn] Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, from Greek kolophOn summit, finishing touch; perhaps akin to Latin culmen top noun
1 : an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts relative to its production
2 : an identifying mark, emblem, or device used by a printer or a publisher

The Person Responsible For This Mess: Tom Hammer

Tom and Zack Hammer - Tom's the one with the beard




I'm a native Californian living in the Bay Area. This blog is mostly meant for family and friends, but all are welcome. I started it in about 2001, when my son was born and before my daughter arrived - mostly, it was an opportunity to share news and pictures with friends and family who couldn't see us regularly. Its evolved into the bouillabaisse you see here.

Your author, Tom, is the one with the beard. The good looking guy is my son, Zack.

The Framework:MoveableType

I've been using Gallery for some time and have been really quite pleased with it. But I recently decided to start using Dhina Annamalai's excellent Jalbum. Fotoplayer allows me to upload my images as JPEGs, while displaying them utilizing Flash to exercise a modicum of control over its presentation.

This approach affords me the flexibility of displaying my images any way I want outside of the galleries, while still having the control over its presentation within the Flash envionrment, and getting lots of nice stuff like auto-resizing for free. Its turning out to be a nice approach.

Ajax and Such

All the cool kids playing with Ajax and Tim O'Reilly's telling the adults they all have to " go Web 2.0. So, I've been playing quite a bit with the Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript frameworks, and you'll see their effects here on Hammerland. I've found Lokesh Dhakar's Lightbox2 scripts to be quite to my liking for displaying images on my site outside of the gallery (that's what allows me to overlay images on top of a web page, including slideshows).

CSS and Site Design

I'm no designer and know my limits! There are zillions of CSS templates out there to take advantage of (Check out CSS Zen Garden). I've chosen to modify Peter Ottery's fine Mollio Theme