Col⋅o⋅phon
n.
1. An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication.
2. A publisher's emblem or trademark placed usually on the title page of a book.
This colophon has both.
About the brand
I came up with gra-phix as a possible company name long ago. I hope to use it when I open up a design shop. For now, though, it serves as the moniker for this site. It's obviously a play on the word 'graphics.' The logo was inspired by John Gruber's Daring Fireball, but only in the sense that it's a circle. I'm not sure exactly why I made a hex shape cut out of the circle, but it reminds me of a socket and it looks dynamic. Maybe it's some sort of hexfuse thing?
About the "author"
OK, I admit it. I may not be the best author in the world. Yeah I know, I know, this document is probably better than all of my entries, but I'm also very apathetic, so I could not care less!
I'm currently 24 and I set up a small PHP script to automatically tell you that. In other words, I don't have to update this page every year if I don't want to. I'm not lazy, I'm just busy. I'm an artist first and foremost. If I could make a good living at it — not to say that I can't or won't — I'd choose it over nearly anything without hesitation. However, I really want a 360 Spyder so that's probably not going to cut it. I really look good in one.
Right now I work for the man, but I've co-started a company called hexfuse where we help businesses be more profitable and presentable online and in-store. As soon as that takes off, the man will see my hand and I'll stay home to work.
About the site
Typography
Body copy is Lucida Grande. If you don't have it, you're seeing Verdana. Headlines are mix of Georgia and Lucida Grande. Trebuchet is used in certain special cases like poems. It all looks better on a Mac except for the title images, done in Skia, which will look good on whatever as long as the monitor's color profile is correct and you haven't hit it with a bat in a fit of rage.
Imagery
Nearly every photo you will see on this site was taken by my Canon S400. I'm probably going to snatch up a 20D before I go to Paris. Everything else was probably in the public domain before I "photoshopped" it. It might've also come from my brain, in which case it's not public domain.
Design
You are looking at the May 2005 design codenamed "240 m.p.h. straight into a brick wall." You'll notice I brought back color. This design was submitted to may1reboot. I had a hell of a time designing the entire core of the site in about a day.
Interactivity
I've kept the major idea of the sidebar the same. It's there to help you understand a little bit more about my tastes. Also, it will soon be XFN Friendly. No female sheep were harmed during coding.
Syndication
Do you like RSS? Are you one of those people who don't visit sites that don't have XML feeds? I don't understand that sentiment but I have a feed so that my site can be syndicated. I feel the true use of XML feeds isn't for human comsumption. XML feeds are most useful for computer to computer communication — exempli gratia I could use a weather feed to show how hot it is in Florida. I don't see much of a need for aggregators except for sites that you only need to read the headlines. In any case here is the feed: xml(rss 2.0).
Behind the scenes
The "book"
The awesome power that is my Apple PowerBook G4 helped me through some tough code on this site. Sitting for hours listening to my favorite music while editing photos, code, instant-messaging, and absoring information from the internet, this thing never quit. It also allowed me to do all of that at the same time without skipping a beat. If you really want to get technical, it's a 15" 1.25GHz PowerBook G4. 512MB RAM. 80GB HD. 100% heart.
The server
Gra-phix.com is run on a Linux server running Apache, PHP, and MySQL. It runs a few other DBMSs but I don't use them. My host is currently CrisisHost. I really recommend them due to the fact that tech support is extremely fast (the guy is usually on AIM 24/7).
The code
That said, my code is written in PHP utilizing a MySQL backend for non-static content. I would consider this page to be static. Other than that, I use XML (RSS is fed and other XML is replaced), XHTML 1.1, and CSS to show all you people out there in TV land what goes on in my daily life.
All code running the blog was hand-written by me with some help from Osmodiar, cousin of Transmodior who was featured on the Flintstones, who taunted me the entire way through. If I've lost you read: I did it all by myself. He made sure I had enough gumption to deliver all my content as I had planned.
Copyrights and so forth
Everything you see here that isn't a book cover, album art, movie poster, etc. is copyright © 2003-2008 Joe Clay. Even the copyright logo looks better on a Mac. All images have been modified to some extent so if you'd like to use them please let me know. In most cases I'm pretty lenient about people using my work as long as proper credit is given. Please don't steal my stuff. I wouldn't do it to you; show me the same respect.
I quite literally despise all forms of spam. I define spam as something that is an utter annoyance and which has no capacity whatsoever to deliver on it's many, stupid promises — or any advertisement that someone, other than me, puts on this site. Any spam found as a comment — it's all emailed to me anyway — will be immediately deleted, the IP will be banned, and your spam will end up in my handy blocker script while you are sent here. You know what I despise even more than spam? Spam that doesn't even try to be relevant to the topic.
