I've been running the website since 1993, back in the days of Trumpet Winsock and the NCSA Mosaic web browser. It started as a side-project for what I was doing at the time, and just grew from there. It was never supposed to be a full-time job, but that's what it ended up being.

Since I'm only one who does any work on the website (I'm not counting the people at Network Solutions, which hosts the site; I'm just talking about the design and stuff) these credits are really just about me. It's a vanity page. Still, people sometimes write in to ask what software I use, or what hardware I use, and I'm putting that here, along with some other thank-yous.

If you want to know why the website looks the way it does, check out the Website Design page. And if you're wondering about my (occasionally weird and/or nonstandard) use of grammar, go to the Website Grammar page. This page is just for listing names and tools and stuff.

Right now I'm using an older iMac for development and editing. It's got a second screen so I can be confused by take advantage of multi-screen workflow.

I've also got a laptop for when I have to go on the road and edit stuff. The largest hassle is getting decent internet from hotels, so the laptop is mostly for social media updates and the like. Right now it's a Macbook Pro from 2018 (I think) but I've used lots of other systems.

I've gone through a series of increasingly nice flatbed scanners to scan the book covers. Then I discovered that I could "talk" to the people in New York who made the covers and get the digital files directly from them. Who knew?

Listen: if you're doing development for anything on a computer, all you need is a system that you like, that plays nicely with the people you're working for or with. That wasn't always the case, but it's true now. What hardware you use is almost irrelevant.

If you are doing web development, that's irrelevant. Everything you need to do will be doable, a hundred ways, on anything you care to use. What it comes down to is what you prefer to use, that your employers will allow.

In an office environment, that usually means "Use what they give you" but in recent years — especially true as of 2020 — that's changed to "Use what you have at home, if it works."

There are lots of ways to edit HTML. I have always used a straight-up text editor, but that's me. Lots of others use visual editors from Adobe or Microsoft or whomever. Right now my editor-of-choice is Atom. It's available for practically everything, it's simple, and it's customizable. And unlike some editors I could mention, it does not rely on a subscription model.

For graphics, I use Photoshop, in Adobe Creative Cloud. It's pricy, and it is subscription-based, but it does everything. I've tried alternatives, but this is what works for me.

For testing, I make sure things work on competing browsers. I don't test the website on everything, but I figure if it works on Apple Safari and Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox and Opera, it's probably good enough.