About…

… The Author

This website is crafted by me, Alex Palmer (a.k.a. XanderX), a final year Computer Science undergraduate student at Royal Holloway, University of London.

When not studying about the Traveling Salesman Problem or hacking at the web I like to game, game, and, uh…  Game.

If there are any problems with the site at all, please e-mail me! Even if I don’t want to be, I’m always in the market for bugs and downtime.

… The Website

I made this place so that I could post about whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want! Be it on my desktop, laptop, or phone.

The schedule of posting is rather haphazard for that very reason, but the feed will keep you updated of whenever I do post. You can find that on the front page!

… Building the Website

The website is based upon the Wordpress CMS, due to the simplicity in making custom themes for it and its extensibility.

The theme is, as you might guess, entirely developed by me especially for use with this website.  It’s taken a heck of a lot of work, and it aims to comply with modern standards and work more or less okay in all modern browsers.

I aim to make the theme work with new features that appear in Wordpress if I like them (as of the time of writing, I most recently updated the template for nested comments).

The footer has itself filled with useful information with the aid of the Recent Posts and Similar Posts plug-ins by Rob Marsh.

For photography posts, YAPB by Johannes Jarolim is used to simplify the display of photos in various sizes, and the addition of EXIF data.  It also made the process blissfully easy to make photo posts display different from normal posts!

And for just in case I ever do become popular: WP Super Cache helps by serving HTML in place of constantly evaluating PHP and MySQL.

If there are any bugs in the template — be it in how it looks in a particular browser, error codes you see, or anything else that could happen — feel free to let me know!

Speaking of which, the contact page makes use of Enkoder by Dan Benjamin for e-mail obfuscation. Take a look at my source code as a result — it’s awesome.