What's in this site?

This site groups a collection of content that I've placed on line because they're connected with my interest areas. Some articles that I've written for publishing elsewhere can also be found here.

Some of the documents at this site are available both in english and spanish. When this is the case, a selection bar with the available languages should be displayed at the beginning of the page.

How is this site maintained?

The way in which this site is maintained, is a consequence of its design, where from the start function triumps form (Hey! I'm an engineer), the greatest simplicity and the following of well defined and open standards.

Various icons at the bottom of each page give clues about how is this process. Let's use those same icons for the explanation:

	This icon recognizes the use of theTemplate Toolkit 2 for producing the HTML or XHTML code that your browser is showing. This tool allows for an easy maintenance of the content, separating it from the elements used for its presentation.
	The content is manipulated mainly thanks to the features of my favorite editor, Emacs. One of the reasons for choosing this editor, is the availability of its specialized modes to manipulate SGML files or interacting with CVS, which I use to keep track of the revisions to the published material.
	Standards are very important and one of the areas where this is shown, is in web content. This is why I've taken the time to insure that these pages follow the XHTML 1.0 standard strictly, according to the W3C. This indicator denotes this and allow you to validate wether the page complies or not with this specification
	CSS is a relatively new technique in the web world, allowing a better separation between the information to be presented and the how to present it. This symbol indicates that the CSS information associated to the page complies with the W3Cstandards.

Presentation conventions

There are various formats I use in the pages and articles to represent different classes of content. The most important are these:

    1: #!/usr/bin/perl
    2: 
    3: # This is the style I use to represent a listing or a piece of
    4: # code. Perl will be the most frequent guest here.

bash-2.05a$ echo "Style for system commands and its output"
Style for system commands and its output

This represent a very important thing I want to say.

Regarding liks, there are two main classes of them: Links to external site, readily recognizable because they carry the mark , and the internal links, which do not carry it.

Information at the end of each page

Towards the end of the page, the terms under which the content is available to the public are briefly displayed. There is more information regarding this topic in the section legal, in case that this interest you.

Among the text at the end of each page, there is some that looks like: $Id: site-en.html,v 1.1.1.1 2005/01/02 11:47:01 lem Exp $ . This text is actually control information that CVS places in the pages and that stores the source, date of the last change and the author of whatever shows up in your browser.

The version and the timestamp can be useful to identify precisely a page, in case you want to provide me with an error report regarding the content or the presentation.

Publicity in the pages of this site

During my experience in open source development, some people has asked me about how to give me an economic recognition for the contribution that my code or publications has meant for their projects. In my particular case (and I believe that this is the case for a large portion of the open source developers), my contribution to the community is inspired by the desire to return the favor. However, I have also felt the ocassional desire to retribute in a special way, what I consider extraordinary actions from some people in that same community, so I understand the situation quite well.

Because all of this and as a test, I've started by a very simple mechanism: I've placed a bar with ads in the pages of this site. I think this accomplishes various objectives, besides opening the chance for economic benefit, that I can simultaneously share with the rest of the Internet community, from which I'm a part.

Please do not try to forge the clicks on the advertisements. That is a conduct expresely prohibited by the terms and conditions of almost any ad servide, besides being anti-ethical and detrimental to the growth of the Internet as commercial infraestructure.