How does this site work?

This site is published using Blogger. Blogger is a free online blogging thing which is owned by Google. When you set up a blog you can publish it for free on their own servers or use you own space. Using you own space is better because you can upload you own images, as I often do.

Using your own space is easy as you just add some FTP details in to the blogger setup pages and Blogger FTPs it for you when you add a post. You can choose from some rather pleasant "look-and feels" too.

For sometime Blogger did not provide comments and as a result a whole host of third party "comment providers" sprang up; I use squawkbox. Squawkbox host your comments and let you ban trolls and stuff. Their site tends to go down a fair bit but they are still preferable to Blogger's new comment feature, which requires logins and guff. I have written a replacement comment thing in JSP/JSTL but I am not sure if I can be arsed to put it live.

The links on the left hand side are provided by Blogrolling. They provide a repository to store you links and prioritise them. Adding them to the site is done by simple adding a javascript library to the Blogger template.

The search box in the top right hand corner is provided by google and just searches this site.

Other bits like the odd form are provided by my own isp.

Cheap as chips.