Colophon: How’d you do that?
About links
Back in the days when people read books, nice books would occasionally have an extra page in the back explaining how it had been printed, called the colophon. It would go like, “Printed at Ye Olde Press in September of 1974, set in Garamond", or something to that effect. This page is that, for the web.
Site technologies
The site is run on a custom content management system, built in PHP with a MySQL database. State location maps are regenerated on the fly when county sighting records are updated.
The live search function, which returns results as you type, is an adoption of wonderful work from some guys in Zurich. There is AJAX-style interfacing going on the sighting submit page as well.
All the javascript work was done in the dark days of AJAX, before the existence of wonderful javascript libraries like prototype, so it is all forged by hand and all very messy.
Everything is served very professionally by my friends at Joyent.
The design
The code (XHTML and css) is standards-compliant to the best of my knowledge. The layout, sans-tables and with image-replacement techniques, should be friendly to our friends with limited vision and our friends who happen to browse the web on cellular phones.
The designer
This site was designed and carefully coded by David Reese. It is set mainly in Georgia. (The font, not the state.)