Table of Contents
Introduction
This site serves as the official site for the Missouri Herpetological Atlas Project. An updated atlas is published annually, or nearly so, in printable form. The recommended citation for the atlas is contained within the most recent printable version. Unless otherwise specified on the footer of a specific page, the recommended citation for the project site is:
Edmond, B.S. and R.E. Daniel. 2008. Missouri Herpetological Atlas Project. <http://atlas.moherp.org/> Accessed: 14 May 2008.Replace the accessed date with the most recent date you actually viewed the site. Copy on most pages is released and not changed significantly. However, if you wish to cite a specific, immutable version of a page, please let me know and I'll push it out as a PDF document that will be versioned if ever changed. Alternately, check out the wayback machine for archived versions of many Internet sites, even very specialized pages such as this one.
Technical Details
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This site is hosted by A2 Hosting, a company that relies on the open-source operating system Linux for their servers and Apache for serving web pages. Dynamic content is created using PHP and PostGreSQL, both of which are open-source and widely used in web development. The Linux / Apache / PostGreSQL / PHP combination, also known as the "LAPP stack", is a robust, reliable, and proven suite of technologies used in web development.
Crimson Editor was the original source code editor used on the site when everything was developed using a Windows XP client. However, I moved everything to a Kubuntu Linux desktop to more closely emulate the actual production environment for the site. As a result, Bluefish is now the editor-of-choice for all pages. Local database access is achieved using the pgAdmin III graphical database client. All pages have been checked for XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS validity as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). You can see this for yourself by clicking on the links found in the footer of each page. Although it is my goal to make this site fully compliant with accessibility standards as defined by the W3C, I'm not quite there yet. Part of this process is ensuring that each page is organized in a meaningful fashion. The "Disable CSS" link, found in the footer of every page, bares the raw content of each page by disabling all visual styling.
Although pages are tested with both Internet Explorer and Opera, the site generally renders most favorably in Mozilla Firefox, which is available for most platforms. Although Internet Explorer is a more popular browser, Microsoft has dropped support for non-Windows platforms. Furthermore, Microsoft has done a poor job of following web design standards, including the implementation of CSS, which this site uses for display formatting. We encourage you to give Firefox a try for all of your web browsing!