Why Celos?

It's a place from The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; I chose it because I liked the name, and it was short and untaken. The reference is in Chapter IX (The Last Debate) of Book Five in The Return of the King; page 909 in most editions. Legolas and Gimli are telling of their journey to Minas Tirith:

Legolas paused an sighed, and turning his eyes southward softly he sang:

Silver flow the streams from Celos to Erui
In the green fields of Lebennin!
Tall grows the grass there. In the wind from the Sea
The white lilies sway,
And the golden bells are shaken of mallos and alfirin
In the green fields of Lebennin,
In the wind from the Sea!

`Green are those fields in the songs of my people; but they were dark then, grey wastes in the blackness before us. And over the wide land, trampling unheeded the grass and the flowers, we hunted our foes through a day and a night, until we came at the bitter end to the great river at last.'

According to the book, it should be pronounced with a hard C (Kell-os) - although you might hear me say it the other way sometimes, to reduce misspellings.

So, now you know. Bet you're glad you asked.

How is the site written?

Virtually all these pages are generated statically from templates using some perl magic. The dynamic parts are probably done with some perl CGI, using the HTML::Template module.

I've used this code for several projects; see www.livewires.org.uk for another example. If you're curious, the code for msite is available from this site. Graphics were done with the GIMP.

HTML style and correctness

These pages loosely adhere to Transitional HTML4; the principles I've used are roughly:

• Keep it simple (and low on graphics).
• Test everything with several browsers. The site should look reasonable on: Netscape 4, Mozilla, Opera, MSIE, Konqueror, Lynx, and W3M.
• No frames or Java[Script]. All dynamic content is server side.
• Use content-based markup and CSS where possible. <font> tags are used only for colour, where CSS isn't appropriate.
• Use heading tags sensibly. Most pages start with <h3>. Unfortunately, many browsers (especially in the netscape family) have broken implementations of CSS as applied to heading tags.

These are my random style prejudices, not my religious convictions. :-) If you don't believe me, try looking at Animal Logic's website, which breaks every one of these rules and is none the less a cool piece of design.

HTML writing links

• Any Browser campaign
• W3C site - HTML and related standards
• Quick reference to HTML, at Bristol university

I used to use weblint. Since weblint stopped being maintained about ten zillion years ago, I should probably make some effort to pull the HTML out of the stone age, but so far haven't mustered up the enthusiasm.

Hosting and registration

celos.net is currently hosted entirely at tertial.org, a co-located server run by a co-operative of which I am a part. It's housed by RapidSwitch.

celos.net is registered with Gandi, a France-based registrar offering very good rates and service for SLDs. I also use Mythic Beasts, including the livewires.org.uk domain, and Linode for some linux hosting.