About Me & This Site
Just like everyone else on the web, I have nothing to say, but yet I spend hours creating a site to prove it.
Who is Josh?
Josh is a 30-something New Yorker who likes movies, television, wine, women, and song. He's been described as having “a laconic, dry sense of humor”, which might be an understatement.
He's six feet, six inches tall, and weighs around 220 pounds. His birthday is September 6, which makes him a Virgo, and he was born and raised in New York, NY, USA, Earth, Milky Way.
He has a wide array of interests, likes almost all varieties of music to some degree or another, and will try just about anything once (except for asparagus).
He wouldn't mind if the U.S. national anthem was replaced by "Louis, Louis". He believes that if you break your shoelace while you're getting dressed for work, you should get a free day off; he loves the smell of the city right after it rains; he thinks that the English language is fun because there's no correct way to write the sentence, “There are three ways to write the word ‘to’.”; he believes that Diet Dr. Pepper really does taste just like regular Dr. Pepper; and he believes that landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth is mankind's crowning achievement thus far, followed closely by the bikini.
WOMBAT Powered
A wombat (Vombatus ursinus) is a somewhat cute marsupial from Australia. They are similar to koalas except that they burrow and don't have a propensity for eucalyptus. They are fairly peaceful creatures, unless provoked.
However, ‘WOMBAT’ is an acronym that stands for “Waste Of Money, Brains, And Talent”, and it's responsible for this site. This site is an enormous WOMBAT.
I Go Both Ways
That's right, I use both Canon and Nikon cameras. Some of the cameras I've used to take photos for this site are: Nikon Coolpix 990, Canon PowerShot S400, Canon PowerShot SD800 IS, Canon PowerShot S90, Nikon FM2, Nikon F3, Nikon F5, Nikon D70 & Canon 50D (plus mobile phone cameras once in a while).
Server Stuff
While the content of this site is WOMBAT powered, this site is published using ExpressionEngine (EE) 1.6.x. It's extremely flexible and can be adapted to work how you want it to, instead of you having to adapt to it. Some modules/plug-ins/extensions used are:
- Tag — Brings taxonomy tagging to EE
- Fresh Variables — Allows EE to use code snippets that are parsed before regular EE tags. Very useful stuff.
- Low NoSpam — Aids in comment spam prevention
- LG Better Meta — Allows each entry in EE to have customized meta information for SEO
- Sitemap Module — Creates a search engine sitemap and pings search engines whenever a new entry is published
- Title Case — Automatically converts text to title case
- HTML Stripper — Strips all HTML from selected text
- Smarty Pants — Converts normal quotes to “smart” quotes
- Category Count — Displays the number of entries associated with each category
- Yearly Archives — Displays archived entries by year and month
- EE Gravatar — Displays globally recognized avatars from gravatar.com
This site runs on a server hosted by Media Temple and uses Apache, MySQL, PHP, and jQuery.
Desktop Stuff
The following software is instrumental to publishing joshmadison.com:
- CSSEdit - For CSS editing (seriously).
- Firefox with the Firebug add-on. - For design and testing.
- Navicat - For managing databases.
- Adobe Photoshop - For serious editing of images and photos.
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - For developing digital photos.
- Skitch - For quick and dirty image sizing.
- TextMate - For hand coding HTML/PHP/jQuery.
- Transmit - For FTPing files all over the place.
They are all run on Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro.
