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We have been developing hypertext and hypertext tools for projects since 1985, even before the existence of the world-wide-web; and we use hypertext as a backbone for organizing most of our thinking and projects. Lately the emergence of browser based editors has put a new level of content management tools in easy reach. The benefits are multifold, supporting distributed information gathering, fewer relays and quality checks, shared workspaces, faster development times, and ultimately lower costs to meet a higher production standards.
The Metacosm website currently uses several different technologies, interlocking to create our web-space. The site interface design, development and technology integration is by Metacosm. Many thanks to our diligent page editors and also all the open source software projects such as Gallery and Oddmuse that make so much more possible.
Our current webspace is hosted by Westhost and based on an Apache Server.
Most all the pages are rendered by a perl script called oddmuse. Oddmuse is a wiki framework that allows for an efficient, interactive, and feature-rich browser-based web editing experience. It supports a wide variety of modular extensions, and creates a valid WW3 HTML document and .rss feed. Static copies of the pages generated by the script are stored for faster end-user service. The metacosm gallery uses the popular php based [1] gallery application and an original (somewhat stale) metacosm theme made in php. (This gallery is the next area due for a rev.)
The website interface is based on the latest standards for web content and then styled using hand-coded .css stylesheets and original photoshop backgrounds. The entire site is valid x-html. Meaning it meets the latest standards for modular web content. This enables the look-and-feel of the site layout to be separated from the site content. .Css makes it simple to reformat the entire layout of the site for your browser or news reader. These standards are also a major step forwards in supporting disabled access of the Internet by allowing the end-user to format the content according to their rules.