viaDigita

What’s RSS?

Tools

Tools

Photography

Photography

Inspiration

Inspiration

Icons

icons

Code

You can't make a website without code - all computers run on code...and, oh my gosh, what an awful lot of code it takes to make a screen show up!

YAML

For viaDigita, I am indebted to Dirk Jesse for his outstanding YAML (Yet Another Multicolumn Layout) CSS code framework. Basic page structure and base-level content formatting are accomplished with YAML code, into which is poured ExpressionEngine code, my own custom styles, and content.

YAML is one of the most well-known CSS frameworks, and for good reason...it pretty much guarantees a nearly identical rendering of web code in more than 15 browsers running on Windows, Macintosh OS, and Linux operating systems, including versions 5-8 of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. YAML comes in a tidy Zip file download of about 600k, and includes a number of XHTML page templates with a collection of CSS files to accomplish a wide variety of "standard" web page layouts.

I chose YAML because it seemed to me to be the most logical code to actually understand in practice and because it is really flexible; you can mix and match parts of code from various provided templates to mix your own layout, and it will just work automatically - pretty neat! YAML also has the distinction of providing the most in-depth and well-organized documentation of any CSS framework I have encountered. I especially like the fact that the YAML documentation comes in a handy PDF file, and in a very good German to English translation as well.

A lot of web designers seem to treat CSS frameworks with some degree of disdain - "you should learn to code on your own" - however, although I have hand-coded a 5,000-page site at work and some smaller sites between 10 and 100 pages each, I find the framework model to be very helpful indeed. For a project where you really need a high degree of consistency across a wide spectrum of web browsers, operating systems, and internet-connected devices, a pre-tested codebase like YAML is a godsend...and in truth, not everyone who wants a website is up for learning to code every little bit of the screen. YAML gives you a good head start with a rock-solid foundation.

ExpressionEngine

I am quite grateful to EllisLab for its ExpressionEngine content management system (CMS), which provides the other main body of code that is inserted into the pages that call the data from the database, thereby filling in pages on the fly. ExpressionEngine (EE) is a PHP-based content management system that uses a MySQL database.

My first version of viaDigita was hand-coded in XHTML, and I had never used a content management system before creating the second version of viaDigita, so jumping into ExpressionEngine has been a real eye-opener. Since this is my first CMS-based system, I can't really speak first-hand about how ExpressionEngine compares with other CMS programs like Wordpress, Drupal, etc. However, my understanding is that EE is a far more flexible system than other CMS applications in terms of the wide variety of types of sites you can build with ExpressionEngine.

EE code is similar in appearance to regular HTML web code, so it's really just a tiny jump into EE from hand-coding. One thing I like especially is that EE allows you to save page templates as text files (e.g., index.php, sitemap.php, about.php, etc.). This allows you to edit your php-based text files in any old editing application you like, such as Dreamweaver, HomeSite, TopStyle, Notepad++, etc. The EE code is very minimal in size and packs real power without bloating your site.

JavaScripts

I use only two javascripts on the site. They work together to provide the functionality you see in the search box at the top of the page where the box appears with text, the text disappears when you click in the search box, and the text then reappears if you click outside the search box.

Both scripts come courtesy of Ross Shannon at HTML Source with a terrific set of instructions for their proper use - thanks Ross!

Artwork

Artwork

Site Policies

Privacy

I myself am a private person — I like my privacy and I try to respect the privacy of others. Though I wish to share my own experiences, feel free to remain anonymous if you wish. Whether I come to know you or not, I hope that you will find something of use and value here at viaDigita.com.

Email

I won’t give out your email address, unless required to do so by law. If, however, you email me with a particularly interesting question or comment I may post excerpts from your email — without your specific, explicit consent — to a web page, along with my answer, if I feel that your question is of a wide enough interest to merit a public answer that would provide benefit not only to you, but also to other readers of this blog. If you would prefer me not to do so, please let me know explicitly in your email.

Cookies

viaDigita.com does not use small text files, known as cookies, in any way. However, I do run advertising on viaDigita.com and advertisers providing ads to my pages do use cookies to track visitor activity from my site to their sites for the purpose of properly compensating me for running those ads that result in visitors at viaDigita.com making a purchase, or taking some other specified action, at the advertiser’s site. Therefore, I cannot be responsible for third-party cookies. If you continue to use viaDigita.com, you assume responsibility for any and all consequences of accessing web pages on viaDigita.com that include advertisements.

FTC Disclosure

I provide this website to share information, experiences, and personal opinion—free of charge—for the benefit of visitors. Although I take great care to provide quality information, I do not guarantee (and accept no legal liability whatsoever arising from or connected to) the accuracy, completeness, reliability or currency of any material contained on this site or on any linked site. Please note that I may receive payment, if you click a link or an advertisement on this site that is directed to the website of a provider of a product or service and you subsequently purchase a product, engage a service or otherwise take an affirmative action in response to the ad or link you clicked. If you find the material here on viaDigita helpful, please consider clicking one of my ads or links to make a purchase as a way to support the future of viaDigita. Thank you.

Advertising

viaDigita.com is funded, in part, through the use of advertisements on its web pages. I have tried to integrate ads into the site in a manner that is relevant to each given web page’s content. I have also attempted to present them in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. My intent is to provide only advertisements that I believe will be of relevance and interest to visitors of viaDigita.com. In many cases, I have personal experience with an advertiser’s products and/or services; however, there are also many ads representing products or services with which I have no personal experience. For example, in some cases I know someone who has enjoyed a particular product, while in other cases an advertised service seems to me to be particularly useful or ingenious (though I haven’t used it myself and may not personally know anyone who has experience with it). Consequently, I cannot be responsible in any way for your own experience with any product or service which you might acquire or utilize as a result of clicking on an ad on this site. If you do access an advertiser through this site and have a poor experience, please feel free to let me know; as stated above, I only wish to provide ads representing products and services that may provide positive value to my site visitors.

Accessibility

I have attempted to create a site that is accessible to all people. However, the difficult truth in web design is that site visitors come from all backgrounds, use all sorts of devices and computers, run various operating systems, have (or do not have) certain fonts installed on their devices, have varying degrees of access (from dial-up to varying speeds of broadband), etc., etc.…you get the idea. If you do run into difficulty using this site, please feel free to let me know. I will certainly try to ensure that all people can use viaDigita.com, though due to time constraints I may not always be able to do so.

Site Updates

While I plan to maintain a regular schedule of publishing, please be aware that I operate this site in my free time. I have a full-time job, a family, and other commitments that also warrant my attention, so updates to this site may or may not occur regularly or at planned junctures. I’ll try my best to keep the site up-to-date and useful for you.

Limitation of Liability

viaDigita.com is provided “as-is.” I do not warrant that any content or functionality provided on viaDigita.com is guaranteed or is necessarily suited for any particular use or purpose. Though I hope you will find something of value and interest here, the use and usefulness of any content on viaDigita.com are entirely up to you and you are solely responsible for your own use of any content found here. To the best of my ability, I provide this site — viaDigita.com — without any negative consequences of any sort. However, in no event shall I be responsible for any adverse consequence of your use of this site.

Policy Change

Any policy listed on this page is subject to change at any time, without notice to visitors. If you need to know whether a policy has changed, please re-visit this page.

The Man Behind The Site

Without going into the gory details, the lovely machine you see at left was the height of technology when I landed on the planet. This particular model, by the Royal Typewriter Company, was the very typewriter I used for years to type my early school reports. I can still hear the wonderful click-clacking of the keys striking the paper...what a sound!

I remember, later, when the electric typewriter arrived. I remember, too, when television got color. I remember when the broadcast networks (all 3 of them) began reporting American casualties direct from Vietnam. When cars were advertised for under $2,000 and movie tickets went up to an astronomical 50 cents apiece!

We once paid 10 cents a gallon for gasoline...and I remember when my father (a chemistry professor) was overjoyed to have just purchased one of the very first "pocket" calculators. At that time, a computer was an entire building, with box upon box of computer punchcards stacked to the ceiling. My early years were full of Apollo rockets, political assassinations, race riots, LP records, and hippies.

Dave the Cellist

So I've landed here on Earth and I start playing the cello. For some reason I always wanted to play the cello...don't know why, or how I even knew, but I wanted to. As time went on, I became proficient enough to venture out. This resulted in three intense summers studying with members of the Boston Symphony at their summer home at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. The quality of the musicmaking was incredible and the beauty of the berkshires was enchanting, so much so that I put in my mind that I would really like to live in a place like that. But first...college.

I studied music first at Indiana University (where there's a rather well-known music school), located in Bloomington, Indiana. I earned a Bachelor’s degree there, studying with cellists Gary Hoffman, Fritz Magg and Janos Starker. The town was very small (aside from the enormous university population) and very artsy-fartsy. I loved living there...lots of great restaurants, art, music, all within a small-town midwestern milieu. The music school was amazing, with literally thousands of concerts a year to attend and perform in, with world-renowned teachers from all over. It was a bit of a trek, but I also used to make regular visits to one of my favorite cities, Chicago, to see the museums, hear the symphony, and walk along the crowded streets.

However, it was at Yale (where there's another well-known music school) that I really felt at home and where I earned Master’s and Master’s of Musical Arts degrees. New Haven, Connecticut is a bustling city, a mix of rough worn-down east coast living with an exciting arts scene and a world-class university dominating the atmosphere. My professor, the great cello teacher Aldo Parisot, was remarkable - lessons I've learned from him will last a lifetime, no matter what I do. The faculty was very special, and enormously talented. A very neat place...and just a few hours trek to either New York or Boston.

Dave the Freelancer

After Yale, I spent a number of years freelancing throughout Connecticut and the New York City metropolitan region, including performances at Lincoln Center and Merkin Hall in New York City. Here in Connecticut, I have performed with the symphony orchestras of New Britain, New Haven, Norwalk, Wallingford, and Waterbury, as well as Orchestra New England (ONE). I have performed under many different conductors, including Gerard Schwarz at the Waterloo Festival and Joseph Silverstein at Tanglewood.

Long a contemporary music enthusiast, I performed at the North American New Music Festival in 1988 (playing Mauricio Kagel's Match with cellist Frances-Marie Uitti and percussionist Robert Fernandez, Elliott Carter's Canon for Four with Flutist Ann LaBerge, clarinetist James Perone, and violinist Karen Bentley, and Carter's A Mirror on Which to Dwell, with soprano Carol Plantamura and conductor Jan Williams). For several years I was also on the performance faculty at the June-in-Buffalo Composers' Seminars, where I worked with composers like Earle Brown, David Felder, and Harvey Sollberger.

I have performed numerous works by composers of the past 100 years, including compositions by Samuel Barber, Bela Bartok, Leonard Bernstein, Ernest Bloch, Martin Bresnick, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Chick Corea, Henry Cowell, John Cowell, Norman Dello Joio, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Jean Françaix, Vittorio Giannini, Don Gillis, Adolphus Hailstork, Paul Hindemith, Alan Hovhaness, Charles Ives, Mauricio Kagel, Witold Lutoslawski, William Thomas McKinley, Olivier Messiaen, Vincent Persichetti, Daniel Pinkham, Serge Prokofiev, Jan Radzynski, John Rutter, Arnold Schoenberg, William Schuman, Dmitri Shostakovich, Robert Sirota, Igor Stravinsky, Werner Thärichen, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Anton Webern, Kurt Weill, Stefan Wolpe, Charles Wuorinen, Dorn Younger, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.

Although I don't play the cello now as often as I would like, Western classical music continues to be central to my happiness. I still perform periodically, most recently giving the world premiere of Ding Dong Bell (8 epitaphs for solo cello) by composer Juliana Hall.

Dave the Computer Guy

Freelancing was lots of fun, but a rough way to make a living. Somewhere along the way I'd gotten married to the most wonderful girl this planet has ever produced - much to my surprise and without even a single date! - and the freelance life became a little old and wasn't paying the bills like it should have. Like others before me, this was time for a career switch.

Now, after grad school I had taken a temp job just to make a little extra money. The first day I was sent to a government agency...and they offered me a job...within my first hour. Regular paycheck. Benefits. Wow!

After a few years, the desktop publishing revolution came along. With the right software package - running on an 8 megahertz IBM AT computer - one could typeset books, newsletters, and the like with as much finesse as businesses with their $100,000 typesetting machines. Swearing I'd never use a computer I fought the opportunity, but eventually I went and bought a book with tutorials and within 3 weeks was typesetting our newsletters using Xerox Ventura Publisher (the gold standard of its day) and saving my employer twice my annual salary.

Promotion. Move to a new city. Time goes by. Another promotion. More work. All of a sudden 20 years have gone by...

Dave the Software Guy

I have found that I enjoy working with computers, as they are very similar to playing a musical instrument. Some of my favorite software applications include Adobe Acrobat, Dreamweaver, HomeSite, PageMaker, and Photoshop, Corel Ventura, Microsoft Visio, and Xara. I really enjoy utilities like Iconico's Screen Calipers and wjjSoft's myBase personal database program. Open source apps like FileZilla, Notepad++, OpenOffice, the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.

One of my more recent discoveries is Oxygen XML Author, an excellent text editor that comes bundled with the outstanding Syncro SVN Client. Another new program for me is Dragon Naturally Speaking software, which turns recorded or live voice dictation into digital text that can be pasted into any program - I'm still getting to know this one.

Dave the Blogger

So today "everybody" seems to be blogging. Well, maybe not everybody, but a whole lot of people. So it's my turn now...I still have a lot of catching up to do. The first version of viaDigita I made was coded with XHTML and CSS, by hand, using Oxygen XML Author as my editor beginning in the summer of 2009. Really fun work, but I couldn't keep any speed up, as I was constantly updating tons of pages.

I came to the conclusion that I had better take the plunge into the world of content management systems...but which one? Well, I really liked what I saw in some of the other systems I investigated, but finally decided that ExpressionEngine would be the best for me. I've enjoyed the ride so far...this system is so flexible, and the developer community is incredibly knowledgable and supportive.

So I'm giving it a go...let me know what you think!

Site Best Viewed with Mozilla Firefox

The words "Best Viewed With..." bring a shudder to web developers worldwide. They hearken back to the dark days of the web as it was in the 1990s, a time when folks made websites to be viewed only in certain browsers.

I know it's not politically correct...not modern...not really acceptable to use such a phrase anymore. But, although I'm making use of the fabulous YAML code framework and reaping the benefits of its cross-browser rendering functionality, I find there is still maybe 1% difference between the appearance of viaDigita in one browser and its appearance in another browser. They're very close...almost identical...but not quite so. And I'm not blessed with time enough to fret over each and every very minor rendering inconsistency.

So I just want to make it clear to site visitors worldwide: use whatever browser you like...Opera, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer...but if you really want to see the site as I imagined it, view the site through the Firefox browser. Despite my best efforts, viaDigita really does look its best in Firefox.

I don't know why...it just does.

All Hail Firefox!

The Technology Behind The Site

The infrastructure technology behind viaDigita is pretty standard fare, nothing too fancy:

• Apache web server
• eAccelerator PHP accelerator and optimizer
• MySQL database
• PHP scripting language
• phpMyAdmin database administration

All main site functionality is provided by the marvellous ExpressionEngine (EE) content management system, version 1.6.8.

In addition to the core EE install, I am making use of the following EE addons:

• Accessible Captcha - extension for changing the captchas from graphic words to user-definable questions and answers
• BN Short Names - extension that simplifies development by making weblog and field short names easier to find
• BN Template Menu - extension that provides a drop-down menu for templates in the control panel
• CM Template Editor - extension that integrates js source code editor EditArea into your template edit area
• CM Textarea Resizer - extension that allows you to vertically resize textareas in the EE Publish area
• Edit Tab AJAX - extension that adds the ability to dynamically search and sort in the Edit area
  
• FieldFrame - a framework for rapid development of fieldtype extensions that comes with five useful fieldtypes
• Goto Latest Comment - extension that automatically scrolls the page down to the last comment after it has been posted
• Gypsy - extension that allows you to assign a custom field directly to multiple weblogs
• LG Addon Updater - extension that allows 3rd party EE developers to notify users of updates to installed addons
• LG Better Meta - extension that creates xml site maps and adds SEO meta data to weblog entries
• LG .htaccess Generator - extension that removes "index.php" from EE URLs
• Livesearch - plugin to enhance the default EE search with an instant drop-down display of matching titles
• Low Random - plugin that returns random files, strings, items, letters and numbers
• Randomizer - plugin that shows random text, such as quotes, on your site
• Search Marker - plugin that highlights the search terms on the results-page
• SL Developer Info - module that provides quick links to edit weblogs, fields, template groups, templates, categories, statuses, file upload locations, etc.
• Solspace Software Update - extension that adds a widget to your control panal to inform you of updates to your Solspace add-ons
• Special Day - plugin that displays special text or an image and associated URL depending on the date
• Structure - module that allows traditional page style content and multiple entry pages to exist within the same area
• Tag - module for tagging weblog entries
• WI Direct to Structure - extension that directs you to the main Structure page whenever you save or update a weblog entry, for sites managed by the Structure module
• Wygwam - extension that integrates the CKEditor wysiwyg editor into your edit entry pages

YAML, ExpressionEngine, and JavaScript code are discussed on the Code credits page.

viaDigita is hosted by WestHost.

Credits

No Man Is An Island

The saying "No Man Is An Island" is perhaps no truer than in the online world - you just cannot have a website "by yourself."

At the very least, there are people providing your site hosting, people making your computer anti-virus and firewall software, real people behind the development tools - HTML editors, CSS editors, graphics programs, FTP software, content management systems - that you might be tempted to take for granted. There are news sites, blogs, social sites, and many other types of sites and online services, all backed by other people adding their contributions for your benefit.

Inspiration also comes from other people sometimes: people who write winningly or paint pleasingly or analyze amazingly or present penetratingly...again, people we can thank for their importance in our lives. Families, friends, teachers, coaches, even complete strangers can show insight and kindness that inspire and challenge us.

Thank You

So in the spirit of true gratitude, I would like to thank the persons and organizations who have so generously given resources and permissions that have greatly enhanced viaDigita.

In addition, I am grateful to the many companies listed in this section who have created high-quality software tools, without which people like myself would be unable to join the online community as creators.

I would, further, like to thank the persons listed here who have inspired me by sharing their experience and knowledge through their articles, books, concerts, newsletters, software, etc., making it possible for me to learn enough and feel inspired enough to create viaDigita.

Site Map

About

 

viaDigita came about for a number of reasons.

Blog

System Utilities

Art Online

Academia Online

Games

Design Inspiration

Design Education

Books About Music

Books By Author

Contact

Software

Entertainment

Online Resources

Design

Classical Music

Books

HOME

Tweak UI Powertoy Improves Microsoft Windows XP

M.C. Escher Online

Yale Online

Family Games Rule Book

Edward Tufte’s “Presenting Data and Information” Seminar

XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook

Visual Design of the User Interface

Streets for People

Brass Rubbing for Design Inspiration

Music - A Book of Quotations

Mercury Living Presence - You Are There! The True Story of a Legendary Label

Jansen Sheet Music Cabinet

Janos Starker Plays Early Italian Cello Sonatas

Money Sense for Kids!

Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best

Nature’s Chaos

Like Shaking Hands With God

Birth of a Blog