About madboa.com
The domain name madboa.com is an homage to a nickname I had when I was a counselor at Arrowhead Lutheran Camp in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Camp counseling was a large part of my early adulthood, and I’d be a lesser person without my experience at Arrowhead and Camp Omega. When I decided to apply for a personal domain, the choice for a name was a no-brainer.
Development tools
Part of the fun of having my own web site is it provides me the opportunity to choose the technological tools I want to use to create and maintain it.
All the tools listed below are Free software. I’ve capitalized “Free” because it means more than $0.00. It means that I can freely access, alter, and redistribute the original source code. It also means that I’m not beholden to any company for the continued maintenance of my software.
Bootstrap is powerful and popular framework for web development. Started at Twitter, Bootstrap provides web styles and components that allow most anyone with a text editor to develop sites the look as good on mobile devices as they do on desktop computers.
Git is a distributed version-control system designed for speed and efficiency. It allows me to branch test versions of my site, undo changes, and keep several working backup copies all in synch.
Hugo is an engine for building static web sites like this one that aren’t database-driven but that rely on plain old-fashioned text files. Hugo provides a workflow that allows developers to separate cleanly content from design. Lots of folks have contributed to the Hugo Themes Site, so you can pick a ready-made look or use their work as a tutorial for developing your own.
Perl is so flexible and multi-faceted that it’s easy to forget how easy it makes so many tasks. Larry Wall’s brainchild sets the bar for scripting languages. It also sets the standard for community involvement: CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is home to a myriad of incredibly useful modules for everything from web programming to playing poker.
Vim is Bram Moolenaar’s improved version of the classic vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. It is for me the quickest way to create and maintain text files.
Hosting tools
This site is not only developed with Free software, it’s also hosted with it.
The Linux kernel and wide range of GNU software power the virtual server hosting this site. The communities supporting both of those projects are huge and wildly dedicated. It’s safe to say that those two projects are currently indispensible within the open source movement.
Apache has been my web server of choice since I first starting managing web sites in the mid-90s. Although it has over the years lost some market share to competitors such as nginx, Apache is still a leader among web servers.
Markup
It is difficult in plain text to express non-linguistic meaning: is this text a subheading? is it a chord in a song? is it part of a data array? Although markup specifications aren’t always considered free software, they provide standard ways to express meaning in textual content. They often have well established parsing modules in open-source programming languages. The markup specs used in the production of this site are