About This Site

Introduction

This site, of course, is devoted to our wedding, the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. We want to share our joy and happiness with all of you, whether you are our relatives, our friends, or just a total stranger. This site not only provides information, pictures, videos etc about our wedding, but it also a token of love, dedication and devotion to my fiancé, Cecilia, and our marriage. I have put a whole lot of time and effort into this web site. If you are reading this paragraph, I would declare this web site to be a success already!

Design

At the time when this passage is written, I was still in an early stage of designing this homepage. I wanted people to feel romatic. I started out with a 'pink and white' theme. And so far, I felt pretty good about it. Since I am a Computer Science-majored guy, I am not good at designing the artistic elements of the web site. But I think that's fine because it represents who I am. A simple and clean design would be pleasing enough for the eyes.

Technical Aspects

Now let's talk about the technical side of this web site. To most of you, probably this is not something you are interested in. The site is currently hosted on my home server with my cable modem internet connection. The upstream bandwidth is low but I don't expect a lot of traffic. And so that would be fine. The pages are written in PHP, a programming language specially suited for web development. Since, I am new to this language, it is a good chance for me to practice it.

Most of the graphics on this site were edited with Photoshop. It is a very powerful tool but I am still learning how to use it. Practice would make better. The challenge at an early stage is that I don't have enough of our wedding pictures on hand. An so you will only see a few of our pictures at the beginning.

Another challenge is to make this site bilingual. I want to create both an English and Chinese version of this site to cater to different audiences. Since I grew up in Hong Kong but am living in the United States now, I have friends and families that can only read Chinese or only English. Typing in Chinese slowed down the progress a little bit. But I mostly started out with the English version and then translate it to Chinese page by page.

One software I found useful in helping me to type Chinese characters is Free ChangJie 2000. It provides some good improvements over the 'stock' ChangJie input method bundled with Microsoft Windows. It allows you to use wildcard in input with the ChangJie input method and it shows you all the matched characters with their ChangJie code while you are typing. I found it quite useful.

Another thing I struggle about is the Chinese character encoding. As you might know, there are several different encoding methods for Chinese characters. There is big5, which is popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And there is also GB2312, which is used mostly in mainland China. But I finally decided to skip these two and use UTF-8 instead. So far it has worked out fine in the IE6 and Mozilla Firebird browsers on my Windows XP English version. I hope it would work fine with other browsers and OS'es too.

The guestbook feature on this site is done by a free php script called Achims Guestbook. It is a decent guestbook, but I have to make a few tweaks to make it works with my Chinese interface customization. I especially like the smileys that come with it .

If you want any questions about this site, feel free to contact me. Thanks for stopping by. Hope you have enjoyed yourself!

Alan