Welcome to the style center of Jemima's Chevron, where you can find out how it all was done.
For those interested in site design, my style sheets and graphics, blog, and other fun bells and whistles are described here. See the scripts page for the PHP, perl and javascript utilities.
The confused and the curious can read about the various free web hosting services I've used or considered using as mirror sites, some tracking and monitoring services, redirectors, and email follies.
Everything fancy here at Jemima's Chevron is done with stylesheets. The stylesheets handle background images, fonts, colors, and layout, including tabs, indenting and the extra space at the bottom of story pages.
All stylesheets are free for any use. See the yellow page for stylesheets and images.
I started out blogging with Blogger, but now I use MovableType. My old Blogger templates are available on the blog page.
I've made several several stylesheets and javascript hacks for MovableType. To see them in action, read the demo blog and click on the Style links at the right. To see the technicolor stylesheet on its own, check out the other demo blog.
The blog stylesheets and javascripts are free, but the latter need a bit of explaining, for which see the blog page.
The free hosts I currently use are Irth.net and Freeshell. Freeshell has cgi without ads, but requires a one-time donation of a dollar and does not offer ftp for that dollar. For more information, see the free stuff page.
The difference between a counter and a tracker is that a counter just counts hits on a particular page, while a tracker collects more information - exactly which pages on your site were visited, what the referring page was, down to even which browser and operating system the visitors use.
A monitor, on the other hand, checks whether your web site is up. Free ones tend to check once an hour or less. You can read about my past monitors and trackers on the free stuff page, and my homebrewed tracker on the scripts page. Irth.net provides statistics, so I no longer use outside counters or trackers.
Redirection seemed like a good idea back when I was migrating from site to site on regular basis. I settled on cjb.net as a redirector service, and it was ad-free for some time. Now, however, it has popups, so I don't pass out that URL anymore. Jade still uses jadeeast.cjb.net, though, since it shortens her URL here by a few directories.
Now Jemima's Chevron is part of the ficml.org domain, and my subdomain (jemimap.ficml.org) serves as a redirector. For more redirectors, all of which seem to pop-up, see the free stuff page.
I've learned through bitter experience never to post an unspam-proofed email address on the newsgroups. My other use for cjb.net is the virtual email addresses, specifically webmaster@jemimap.cjb.net. I use that all over this site, unspam-proofed, because spammers don't tend to email webmasters.
I never thought I'd have an updates list, but I started one on Yahoogroups and still send out updates, every now and then. Otherwise, I just use my email at freeshell, which I will not reveal here. For a full saga of the email and updates list, see the free stuff page.
I don't belong to any webrings or link to any topsites rankings, since such off-site links tend to draw people...off the site. However, I do have a page of links, more for my own convenience than anything else.
My favorite funky web thing is Wiki. WikiWeb is a family of programs that allow any user to edit web pages through a simple interface. I learned about wikis when I was researching knowledge base programs for work. I've set up three fanfic wikis, for the JetC23 Collective, the J/C Collective and CSFic, the C/7 mailing list. You can find out more about wikis (and try your hand at them) by following those links.
There's also a wiki at Freeshell; it's a fairly high-powered one, using TWiki. It's useful for keeping pages that need to be more static than a blog, but more easily updated than a normal web page.