This 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 folks at EllisLab. ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built on CodeIgniter, and so Dane believes if it’s good enough for that, it’s good enough for Brainside Out. He’s running the latest CodeIgniter 2 source available from the Mercurial repository at Bitbucket.
The grid-based layout of this site uses a custom CSS framework, derived from Blueprint CSS and 960.gs, as well as some of Dane’s own personal tricks. Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate and the HTML5 Reset have offered some fine inspiration for Dane’s work, and LESS CSS allows him to programmatically generate his robust grid layout. Dane’s been building websites in XHTML/CSS since 2003, and thus has an increasingly irrelevant sixth-sense for sniffing out Internet Explorer rendering bugs. The painful process of building standards-based websites with IE5 support resulted in an embarrassingly intimate relationship between Dane and CSS. He knows this stuff cold, but is more than happy to stand on the shoulders of others wherever possible.
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 Git repository at Beanstalk, which he manages via the command line. On those days when FTP trumps git pull, Dane sides with Panic’s Transmit. He maintains a local development environment using MAMP PRO, which handles all the necessary Apache, MySQL, PHP and Virtual Host nonsense without mucking up his OS X install. Dane does most of his database work in Sequel Pro, isn’t afraid of Terminal and SSH, and keeps his Ruby Gems up-to-date for the occasional Rails project.
All of Dane’s typefaces are handled through Linotype’s FontExplorer X Pro. He’s on the Adobe CS5 bandwagon and mostly uses Photoshop and Illustrator, but depending on the nature of the project may use InDesign or Premiere Pro. He does not do Flash, except for when he goes through airport security.
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.
— Last updated: November, 2010
