Betacantrips/ about

About me

My name is Ethan Glasser-Camp. I like to program. I am a New Yorker and a returned Peace Corps volunteer. I like music.

I like to keep track of people. Are you one of the people I am looking for?

If you want to send me encrypted email, my public key is at ethan-public.gpg.

About my name

My given name, Ethan, is Hebrew. Its meaning is given variously as "strong", "firm", "steadfast", "responsible" -- none of these are qualities I have in any measure. My parents chose the name because they liked the way it sounded.

My last name, Glasser-Camp, is the names of my father, Marc Glasser, and mother, Donna Camp, joined with a hyphen. My mother chose not to change her last name when she was married, so I got both names. This is fairly uncommon practice in the United States and some computer systems don't know how to handle characters like the hyphen in names.

About this site

This site is built using ikiwiki, a wiki compiler.

Originally I was just going to write a bunch of HTML pages. I figured that Linux HTML-editing programs like Quanta might have advanced past just letting you edit HTML, and might have really neat features. I was wrong; they just help you write tags. That got old quickly, so I started to look at template systems. I looked at webgen, which I liked the best, but also pubtal and rest2web. Then I realized that these tools, while nice, don't provide RSS feeds. Unfortunately, I took a vow once to never have a webspace without RSS feeds, so I had to keep looking.

I decided that what I wanted was a wiki, and ikiwiki had gotten a lot of mindshare on Planet Debian recently, so I gave it a shot. Like a lot of powerful software, ikiwiki gives you the tools to invent your own system, so I struggled at first with putting together a coherent site. In case you're stuck in a similar situation, I have some notes posted on the site's structure.

About the prettiness

The site design is called blue:sky. I found it here on oswd. I don't know much about graphic design, except that I suck at it, but you can see that Jonas John has some real talent. I hacked the crap out of his design to fit it to the ikiwiki templates. This is a work in progress, but you can grab the templates from templates. Be sure to also grab the CSS from here.

The following terms are used for different effect in the Blue Sky design and the default ikiwiki template:

  • Blue Sky "header" refers to the big white text in the upper left. ikiwiki "header" refers to the breadcrumb trail (which is "path" in the Blue Sky HTML).
  • Blue Sky "content" refers to the big text that you're reading now. ikiwiki "content" refers to the main text of the article, which is Blue Sky "main". I changed Blue Sky "content" to "content_column".
  • ikiwiki "footer" refers to the <div> where the "Last edited" text goes. Blue Sky "footer" refers to the copyright notice/design tag. I changed this to "designinfo".

Blue Sky design by Jonas John.