How did this site come to be?

The image you see towards the top of the page is a pen an ink drawing by Hall Tennis:
May 7, 1987: Immigration Center, 3rd Arrd., Paris France. Awaiting Interview

I've used a lot of open source tools in the creation of this site. LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. There's still some Perl back there to for the backstage heavy lifting.

The search engine you see at the top of each page is provided by AtomZ. They do an awesome job of both their free "trial" version and their enterprise products.

The "Community" pages, those that you can go in and edit are stored in a Wiki, or a Twiki to be more specific.

My "What's New" section is handled through a BLOG, currently Blogger. I'm also a fan of Userland Radio 8, which I sometimes use to post.

My E-Zine "Better Sites" is a mass e-mail thing for which I use Mojo. Mojo rocks and the guy who makes it seems like a real shredder-dude.

My shopping cart is provided by 1shoppingcart.com.

Network security on my intranet is provided by the stellar guys at DMZ Services.

Marketing advice is always a good thing to have, and you can get some from Robert Middleton and Action Plan Marketing.

I use Sawmill for log analysis and BitStream for individual visitor metrix collection.

My project management and Project Sites are handled by an open source project called PHP-Collab