What Does It All Mean?
Wait. Wait a second. What the hell does hinkybox mean?
Search me. It sounded cool as I was staring at the screen trying to come up with a name.
This site is a “mental content aggregator” born out of the confluence of many hobbies; with so little time to spend on each, I suppose it is only natural that they would eventually collide. Having a place to write it all down is peachy.
This website utilizes 100% standards-compliant markup; XHTML transitional for the most part, and some XML and XSLT thrown in for good measure.
Fonts, you say? Well, I'd like to think that most folks see the site as I intended, but the face I chose as primary is, as of this writing, in limited distribution (until Windows Vista comes out, that is). Here's the CSS ruleset that controls the font-family:
body {
color : #111924;
font : 11px/12px "Candara", "Segoe UI", "Trebuchet MS", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;
margin : 0;
padding : 0;
}
The flash-replaced subheadings are rendered with the Frutiger 47 Light Condensed and the plain-ol' image-replaced subheadings are (currently) rendered with the snazzy but ornery font Reprobate.
The content, sparse and chunky as it is, comes directly from my head. Oh yeah, and where would any of us be without del.icio.us.
The design was/is achieved with Photoshop CS and The Gimp. The CSS and markup is hammered out by hand with Dreamweaver and, on occasion, BlueFish and XMLspy.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Wheatblog, the web API at the heart of the journaling system. Not only has Wheatblog been an integral part of this site, but I have had the opportunity to give something back by working on the development team, an endeavor that's made me both keenly aware of the benefits of open-source collaboration and appreciative of the creativity involved in bringing the world wide web to life.
The term “hinkybox” comes from a joke I have with some friends and fellow computer hobbyists — I am and always have been a sort of pack-rat, and I refuse to let a perfectly good piece of equipment die. Hinkyboxdotcom began its life as a pet project, hosted out of a closet on an ALR Dual 6 — just such a dinosaur. Hosting is now provided graciously for a fee by mediatemple.
So this is it: My Opus. Funny, that sounds like a familiar eye condition.
The Author
My name is Joshua Estell.
I am a
network engineer,
living and
working in suburban
Maryland San Antonio.
I've always
been a bit
of an artsy-fartsy
type, though
in college,
my Intermediate
Painting
131 professor
was kind
enough to
tell me that
I have “the
hands of
a blacksmith”. Not
long after
this epiphany,
I found the
happy compromise
of digital
design, and it quickly became a creative outlet. I
have been
mucking my
way through
it ever since.
As tourist in the web design world (for about 5 years now), I've chosen to learn things my way. I have been lucky enough to never need to make any serious money on web design, which has allowed me to keep it as an escape, without the contempt that eventually comes with schedules, deadlines, and expectations.
Well, that's about it. If you've managed to read this far, I truly appreciate the interest. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop me a line. ◊
Thanks for stopping by.
