About the site and its author

About the author

Robert Dumas is a librarian in his early thirties, who lives in Chicago and has an addiction to reading that would make a heroin addict blanch.

A short history of RobertDumas.org

RobertDumas.org started out as a simple Blogger account in November of 2001 when my senior programming project was causing me to suffer a terrible bout of insomnia. I bought a domain for it in August of 2002 and called it Obnoxious, where it remained until May 1, 2008, when I launched RobertDumas.org, where it remains to this day.

About the design of the site

RobertDumas.org is built with an eye towards ease of use and accessibility. The site uses WordPress (to provide the back-end and behind-the-scenes plumbing), XHTML and CSS to handle the layout. While a few pages may not validate, over ninety percent of them should.

RobertDumas.org also implements accesskeys, which lets people with handicaps use the site, even if they’re not using a mouse. (It also makes it quick to navigate the site using simple keystrokes.) To find out how to use accesskeys, read your browser’s help files.

• Accesskey 1 takes you to the Front Page.
• Accesskey 2 takes you to the Archives.
• Accesskey 3 takes you to the About page.
• Accesskey 4 places the cursor in the Search box.

Since RobertDumas.org is designed the way it is, certain older browsers which cannot handle modern page-design methods will not be able to view the site in all its styled glory. However, the site is designed to be, at the very least, readable in these browsers.

Thanks

Site Design Thanks

Although the design of RobertDumas.org was completely hand-coded by me, there are some people I ought to thank for helping and inspiring me. Thanks to Emma for being the first person I knew (personally) to have a really terrific-looking site that used stylesheets in place of tables. Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman and the folks at A List Apart for showing me how much easier stylesheets can make a site to design and implement. Thanks to all the great folks who make Wordpress, the top-notch weblogging software upon which this site runs. Thanks to Nao, who made the great illustration of me which you see in the header.

Other, Inspirational Thanks

Thanks to Brian for helping me to really get into computers and for all those late-night Descent matches in Tolentine Hall’s computer labs. Thanks to Andy for the late-night Twisted Metal matches. (With all these late-night gaming sessions, is it any wonder I got kicked out of Villanova?) Thanks to Brenda for being just plain wonderful. Thanks to Wolf for being insane and for building a six-foot Terminator out of copper tubing in Val’s art class. Thanks to anyone I’ve forgotten to thank; you know who you are. And thanks to you, dear reader, for taking a few moments out of your day to read what I have to say.

Copyright statement

All original content on Obnoxious—weblog entries, photographs, et cetera—is made available to you, the reader, under a Creative Commons License. All non-original content—for example, a quote from another site—is subject to its owner’s own copyrights. Most folks don’t mind quotes, but it’s up to you to make sure that it’s all right with them.