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About
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.. contents::

Rob Brewer
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Currently I live in Marlton, NJ, USA and spend
my days doing software research and development
for a local company.  When I'm not working
I enjoy swing dancing, unicycling, and travelling.
I have an MSE degree in systems engineering from 
`University of Pennsylvania`_, 
and a BS degree in electrical engineering from 
`Penn State`_.

.. _University of Pennsylvania: http://www.upenn.edu
.. _Penn State: http://psu.edu

This Site
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I built this site using Docutils_, which
features a very lightweight markup
language called reStructuredText_.  It shares
some similarities with Wiki syntax, but
is more thoughtfully designed and more powerful.
What's nice about it is that you write *very* readable
documents as plain text, and then they can be 
translated into XHTML for the web or LaTeX for
printing.  

.. _Docutils: http://docutils.sf.net
.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html

I have released the scripts I used to build
this website in my projects section as buildhtml2_.
If you would like to see an example of reStructuredText (reST),
here is the `source for this page`__.  You can also
look at the `header and footer`__ which is added 
to every web page.  There's also a link at the very bottom
of every web page on this site to view the reST source.

__ $#sourcefilename$#
__ /style/headerfooter.txt
.. _buildhtml2: /projects/buildhtml2

Other software and sites that I found useful:

+ `Beginner's Guide to CSS and Standards 
  <http://friendlybit.com/css/beginners-guide-to-css-and-standards>`_:
  excellent intro to CSS
+ `W3 Schools <http://www.w3schools.com>`_: good intros on HTML and CSS
  with more depth
+ `W3 CSS <http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS>`_: CSS standards and more tutorials
+ `Listamatic <http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic>`_: good
  examples of navbars and turning lists into things you never dreamed of
+ `UsableType <http://usabletype.com>`_: explores making nice-looking sites
+ `Furius <http://furius.ca>`_: a super example of using reStructuredText_
  to create a website.  Lots of stuff to learn by example here.
+ `CSS Zen Garden <http://csszengarden.com>`_: amazing styling with CSS
+ `OpenSourceCMS <http://opensourcecms.com>`_: try out various Content
  Management Systems without downloading them.  
+ `Python <http://python.org>`_: my favorite language du jour
+ `XEmacs <http://xemacs.org>`_: my favorite text editor
+ `Debian Linux <http://debian.org>`_: my favorite linux distro

What Didn't Make the Cut?
==========================

I nearly went with `MoinMoin Wiki`_
or WordPress_ but decided to roll my own
bare-bones templating system with Docutils_ and write my own CSS for now.
A big driver for that decision was my desire to write as
much of my content as possible with reStructuredText_.  Yes, I think
it's *that* good.  MoinMoin and Trac_ support reStructuredText, 
but it seems like it was an afterthought and
it's not clear how well it is supported by the various plugins.
My hope is that by going with reStructuredText
now, if my needs change in the future I should be able to migrate
my content to a new system.  And by that time, reStructuredText
may have better support by the standard packages out there.
The main way I can see my needs changing would be 
to handle more dynamic content and easier editing from the web.

rest2web_ also didn't make the cut, but that's a 
longer story for another page.  The short version
is that I don't like the way rest2web requires a
"restindex" section in every file on the website.  
This forces me to pollute every page with
website-specific data which doesn't even conform
to reST syntax.  Essentially, rest2web has
created its own proprietary file format which happens to 
have reST in the second portion of it.  But
rest2web has some other nice features, and 
I'm wondering how difficult it would be to 
eliminate this one problem which is a showstopper
for me.

.. _MoinMoin Wiki: http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de
.. _WordPress: http://wordpress.org
.. _Trac: http://www.edgewall.com/trac/
.. _rest2web: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/rest2web/