The Civilized Explorer

About this site...

The Civilized Explorer is created and maintained on Macintosh computers using OS X. We use the following tools to generate the content, imagery, and markup.

Beginning in January 2003, we have begun using Adobe GoLive to manage the site. The number of pages and updates was getting unwieldy with BBEdit; with GoLive, we found a number of errors in links, orphaned pages, and the like, and it handles uploading modified pages for us without forgetting which pages we updated.

In addition to creating content on our home computer, we have begun using PBWiki for both content creation and content storage. Making changes online is a snap, does not require starting GoLive then uploading the changes, and works from a browser anywhere in the world.

We use BBEdit as our text editing program. BBEdit is available from Bare Bones Software. We use BBEdit to work with JavaScript, perl, and PHP. Our pages are hosted on a server which runs BSD, a UN*X-like operating system. We do not write our own perl and PHP scripts from scratch, but we do modify freely available scripts to work with our site, and we use BBEdit for that. We cannot recommend highly enough that you have your site hosted on a server using a variant of the UN*X operating system, so that you can avail yourself of the many thousands of freely available scripts running on Unix, Linux, BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and the like.

Some of our pages use JavaScripts for various purposes, including verifying that forms are filled out correctly, searching our site, creating calendars and calculators, and we use BBEdit for that, too. BBEdit has plug-ins which aid in the creation of HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and perl.

Our photographs are taken on a Nikonos V underwater camera, a Nikon FM2n 35 mm camera, a Pentax 67 medium format camera, and a Canon Digital Rebel, a Canon PowerShot S230, a Nikon CoolPix 990, and a Nikon D-70 digital camera.

Photographs on film are scanned by a service to Kodak's Photo CD or Pro Photo CD for inclusion on our Web site. The Sony images are transferred to our fixed disks from the floppy. We use an application called Rename to, uh, rename files from the scans and the digital camera. Rename is one of several helpful programs from publicspace.net. Rename is aimed directly at our usage: transferring files among a digital camera or Kodak Photo CDs, a Mac, and our BSD server.

After transfer to our fixed disks, we use Graphic Converter from Lemke Software or Elements from Adobe Software to crop, rotate, resize, and generally manipulate the images. Our blue buttons were created by the good people at Eos Development, which offers images for your free use. Their work is excellent, and we recommend them highly.

The Civilized Explorer is free. We are affiliated with Hunter Publishing for book sales, and we get no revenue other than these sales. For more information, visit PaperView. As a result, we use programs which give us the most use for our money. You will see a number of shareware programs on our list. We feel that the ones we use give us excellent value for their price. (We pay for the shareware programs we use, and we encourage everyone to do so.)

This page was last updated Wednesday, February 1, 2006. The information provided is current as of this date.

As always, if you have any objections, corrections, suggestions, or questions, drop us a line via Cyber Poste.

Some of our pages are presented with light text on a dark background. This makes printing them difficult. If you wish to print a page with your default settings, see if the page has a link at the top called TEXT. If so, follow that link for a printable page.