idiomatrix

Idiomatrix owes a great deal to a number of people. In no particular order:

Shoreham Telephone: A small, independent, family-owned telephone company! That's right, Don Arnold and his brother Joe continue to operate the phone company started by their father. The first all fiber optic backbone telephone company in the state of Vermont, STCO is our ISP and soon to be hosting facility as well. As the second DSL customer, we have quite a history. The men and women at Shoreham Telephone could teach the big boys a few lessons.

WordPress: WordPress is the blogging engine currently running the individual blogs at idiomatrix. It's an extremely flexible open source tool that I began to use academically after attending a session at the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese in Acapulco some years ago.

Drupal: Drupal is essentially a content management tool kit which can be used to build a content management system, which can then be used to build a web site. We're using Drupal for the non-blog portion of the idiomatrix web site. This is one powerful, open source tool. Put this into the hands of someone more skilled than I, and I'm sure you can build incredibly powerful and flexible web sites. We've only just begun to scratch the surface...

Markdown and PHP Markdown: John Gruber at Daring Fireball originally created the MarkDown syntax and the perl version. This is a writer's tool that allows one to write for the Internet, taking advantage of all that that has to offer, without having to clutter your writing with html. The Markdown engine, or more specifically in our case, the PHP Markdown Extra engine ported by Michel Fortin, generates properly formatted xhtml from all that is posted within drupal and wordpress.

Scott Wallick: Scott created the theme that forms the basis of much of the content here at idiomatrix. Scott is an editor of ESL materials (and so we have a natural affinity for him as a fellow language scholar). We're using his theme 'veryplaintxt' as the basis, though I've managed to screw around with it and probably turn it into an abomination as far as he's concerned (his stuff is very clean). All ugliness here can be attributed to me and represents my inept attempts at "modifying" Scott's work.

RBrowser: Written by Robert Vasvari, this is a critical tool in managing all of the sites I run online. It is a remote file management application that dates to the early NextStep days. Not a day goes by but it isn't used here, and it's always in my dock and running.

CocoaMySQL: Written by Lorenz Textor, this is an opensource mySQL management tool that works wonderfully. Again, another tool I use everyday. I'm currently using the CocoaMySQL-SBG tree adapted by Stuart Glenn.

CSSEdit: A very nice tool for edit CSS files. This allows both GUI and textual editing.

TextMate: THE editor for all of the text and php files used to create idiomatrix.

Eric Snay: Eric saved my bacon. Eric's a colleague from FHUHS and when the server went down with me several thousand miles away, and no prospect of a console visit for months to come, Eric drove over an hour away on a Friday evening to sit at the console and bring us back up. The man!