JA Designs

For those who <3 tech specs:

This website is built on Drupal 6 and sits on a LAMP stack (Ubuntu 8.04, Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.0, PHP 5.2) running on my lovely slice (VPS) from Slicehost.

Surprisingly enough, all the nice Ajax dynamism is achieved by a combination of existing Drupal contributed modules:

• CCK is used to help define each project in the work portfolio as a content type.
• FileField/ImageField/ImageAPI/ImageCache is used to manage the project screenshots. ImageAPI uses ImageMagick for no particularly reason: the supposed quality improvement of ImageMagick over GD2 is probably irrelevant for this site, but the supposed difficulty in configuring ImageMagick is equally non-existent (probably as the Ubuntu folks packaged ImageMagick into a nice package).
• Markdown provides an easy text-to-XHTML syntax and External Links adds the extra bit of usability of labelling external links.
• Quick Tabs implements the Ajax action when moving between pages, while Dynamic display block is used to implement the rotating widget for my work portfolio.
• Webform powers the contact form.
• Twitter is used to fetch my tweets on cron runs and Views tosses the tweets into the Ajaxified tweet listing.
• Basic is the base theme I modified into the current look and feel.
• A collection of other minor modules are also used:
  • Link
  • Date (not yet fully implemented here)
  • Pathauto
  • Google Analytics
  • jQuery Update