Hello and thanks for stopping by, and then actually caring enough to read more about the tech on the site.  This place is entirely home designed, developed, and hosted.  If it sucks, well it's our problem, no blaming anybody else.  However, we hope that it does indeed work for most of you and would appreciate it if you would let us know if anything is NOT working.  You can drop a line to admin(nospam) - AT - bookerdog.com  Follow the standard proocedure and replace the AT with an @ and remove the (nospam).

One thing I do know is that the picture catalog doesn't work on many of the downgrade Netscape browsers.  I'm going to do some redesign there soon, but it really isn't a major focus.  Most of the world uses Microsoft, and I use Microsoft tools, so they are by far the easiest to code to.  Still though, I will be trying.

Speaking of trying to meet the needs of our dear readers, I have done some big revisions to the layout if you are visiting this page from a mobile device.  Since I have become the owner of a spiffy Dell Axim X3i handheld, I now understand the frustrations that most sites provide the handheld consumer when surfing the web.  Since I use my own page as a portal and have subscribed to it as an AvantGo page, I figured I'd stop annoying myself and actually make the thing look halfway decent on the small screen.  Thing is, since most of the things that appear on the web page are just little component pieces it was really pretty easy to change the page rendering so it works for the handheld.  That is why ASP.Net and Visual Studio is such a nice way to build and maintain a site.  For now, it's the Main and Archive Pages that have been tricked up, but I'll get to the pictures very soon.

I've recently slicked up the code for the blogs a little bit.  The first time through was my first stab with XML and I drove myself absolutely nuts when trying to get it to work.  It's a bit better now, not that you'd be able to tell.  However, if you've been struggling with how to take the Blogger feed and turn it into data that you can then render in your own personal way, drop me a line and I'll see if I can explain it for you.  Getting Valid XML out of Blogger was half the battle.

I am also working on getting our RSS feed to work properly.  We do have one currently, but if you click the link to the actual post it's not formatted for the site and serves up an error page.  That's more of a Blogger automatic formatting issue, but I think I have a way around that one too.  I'll put a syndication link here when it works right.

We do use some cookies around here, but it's just so we can track web visit statistics.  No personal or private information is ever collected.  The only thing our cookie will tell us is that you've been here before.  Which is something that we personally like to know, because we feel full of validation and self worth when our creative work affects you enough to return.  We do also check if you came here by clicking the link at some other site, but that's just so we can see who is referring to us.

Thanks,

- The Management (aka Bookerdog, Jake, and Kirby)