About Marc A. Garrett · 179 words posted 1458 days ago

Marc A. Garrett Marc A. Garrett was born in Japan and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Georgia, he earned a Juris Doctor at the American University Washington College of Law. He has co-authored two computer books published by Macromedia Press and Apress; served as technical editor for several titles from O’Reilly and New Riders; authored the monograph Bleeding Kansas: The Shulers and the War on the Border; and written numerous articles for publications such as The National Jurist. He has also written for Digital Web Magazine.

Mr. Garrett specializes in web-based applications written in Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.NET. His recent clients include the state of Maine, Banfield pharmaceuticals, and a bond house with offices in New York and Hong Kong. He has worked in New York City, Singapore, and Washington, DC, where he currently lives with his wife.

You can contact him at marc@since1968.com. If you are spontaneously moved to buy him stuff, you can visit his Amazon wish list (hint: you can sort by priority).

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Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time · 538 words posted 1500 days ago

Those of us—programmers, developers, or layabouts—who are not designers still feel obligated to put our best foot forward when posting our content to the web. I spent a bit of time this morning pulling together previous versions of since1968.com, courtesy my archives and the WayBack Machine. From oldest to current, here are the past versions of since1968.com:

ca. May 1998

since1968, 1998 version. Funny how table-based layouts of 1998 look so 2004.

Don't try this at home At the time, I had only one site under my belt: an educational page about pre-Civil War Kansas, since extinct (the site, not Kansas). I haven’t the faintest idea why I thought I was qualified to build sites for other people. This version was built with FrontPage. It’s a table based layout, with FONT tags to style the text. I’ve lost the graphics, but the home page included the same animated email gif everyone used that year. Incredibly, google still shows over 3,000 hits for this image!

ca. July 1999

since1968 1999 mock-up

I’ve lost this version of the site, but I still have a print-out, shown above, with handwritten notes (you can see a larger version here). The site went through various incarnations that year, but by August it was built with Elemental Drumbeat 2000 , an incredible piece of software later purchased (and discontinued) by Macromedia. I had worked with FoxPro and Access for several years; Drumbeat allowed me to extend those skills to ASP with a drag and drop interface. By late 1999, I had posted a database-driven list of other sites.

Notice the use of plural. Instead of our and us I’m pretty sure I meant my and me.

ca. 2001

since1968 summer 2001

In 2001, I converted the site from ASP to ColdFusion and abandoned the idea of listing other sites—I figured I was never going to beat google, and my site logs proved it. I also abandoned the use of machine-generated markup and instead coded by hand in ColdFusion Studio. I posted my first interview, with Kelly Goto, in October. The layout was table based, but the fonts were controlled with CSS. Of my previous layouts this one is my favorite—or at least the one that causes me the least embarrassment. I think the color palette came from a Banana Republic catalog. You can view a larger version here!.

Looking back, I’m surprised by how much dead white space I left on the home page; I think I took above the fold way too seriously. The interior pages expanded nicely, though, for the interviews and book reviews.

ca. 2003

since1968 Winter 2002-2003

In February 2003, I switched to an all-CSS layout—pretty late in the game, considering Zeldman published his journey two years earlier . The thing is, I still couldn’t get the box model right, so the site looked awful in Win IE5.

Nov. 2003-June 2004: The Wilderness of Default Templates

In November 2003 I switched from my home-brew Windows/ColdFusion system to LAMP/MovableType. I used one of the default style templates, and didn’t think much of it until I started getting compliments on it.

This Spring I switched from MovableType to TextPattern, and for the first month or so used another default template.

July 2004: Yesterday’s Styles Today

Yesterday's Styles Today

So I’ve come full circle. The newest re-design uses the same layout as my first site design: a banner, a content section, and a sidebar. Plus ca change, plus c-est la meme chose.

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About since1968.com · 194 words posted 1500 days ago

since1968.com has been published by Marc A. Garrett (me) since 1998 and features interviews with Lawrence Lessig, Steve Krug, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Joshua Davis, as well as book reviews, cultural critiques, and original code snippets. The web site’s name refers to the vintage of the publisher, not the site.

since1968.com is currently published with TextPattern and hosted by TextDrive on Apache/FreeBSD.

Other software and techniques used on the site:

The nature pictures that appear as the site banners were taken by me with a Panasonic DMC-FZ10. You can view more of my pictures here.

Yes, I know the site doesn’t look so hot in Internet Explorer 5.5. Browser upgrades are free.

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