This entire website was personally designed and coded by Dane Petersen. It runs on a lightweight content management system of Dane’s own devising, built in PHP using CodeIgniter, an open-source MVC framework from the wonderful folks at EllisLab. ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built on CodeIgniter, and so Dane believes if it’s good enough for that, it’s certainly good enough for Brainside Out.

The grid-based layout of this site is courtesy of Blueprint CSS, a wonderful CSS framework that smoothes over many of the rough burrs of standards-based website design. Dane has been building websites in XHTML/CSS since 2003, and thus has an increasingly irrelevant sixth-sense for sniffing out IE6 rendering bugs. The painful process of building standards-based websites that needed to support IE5 has resulted in an embarrassingly intimate relationship between Dane and CSS. He knows this stuff cold, but like any talented artist can recognize an immensely useful tool when he sees one. Blueprint CSS, as well as 960.gs, are just those tools.

Dane knows what is, and what isn’t, Ajax. He has, after all, worked with Jesse James Garrett. Any sort of snappy Javascript hotness you encounter on this website is all thanks to the jQuery framework. Dane started dabbling in Prototype and Scriptaculous years ago, but has since migrated to jQuery after discovering its incredible superiority, including its tiny footprint, built-in effects library, and drop-dead simple chaining. Plus, if you actually need to make an asynchronous Javascript call to the server, it does that too!

Dane uses a late-2008 MacBook Pro. He writes all his code in TextMate and hosts it in a Subversion repository at Beanstalk, which he accesses through an OS X application called Versions. On those days when FTP trumps svn up, Dane sides with Panic’s Transmit. He maintains a local development environment in his Sites directory, and uses VirtualHostX with a few custom directives to map each project folder to a fake development URL. He handles the big jobs using the native OS X installations of MySQL and PHP, does most of his database work in Sequel Pro, and isn’t afraid of Terminal and SSH. He keeps his Ruby Gems up-to-date for the occasional Rails project.

All of Dane’s typefaces (or fonts) are handled through Linotype’s FontExplorer X 1.2.3 application. He most often uses Photoshop and Illustrator, but depending on the nature of the project may use InDesign, Premiere Pro or (god forbid) Flash Professional.

Dane keeps his life organized using Things and Yojimbo.

Dane has an iPhone, but he tries really hard not to think that makes him better than everyone else.