Athena Colophon

Colophon

col-o-phon (kol'e fon') n 1. a publisher's distinctive emblem. 2. an inscription at the end of a book or manuscript, used esp. in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, giving the title or subject of the work, its author, the name of the printer or publisher, and the date and place of publication.
-The Random House Dictionary, Revised Edition

Athena's site design results from many influences. First of all is the requirement that every page be easily readable and properly rendered on whatever browser a visitor may be using.
Every page at Athena is checked against the W3C HTML Validation Service, Web Site Garage, CAST:Bobby, and others. No page is published that does not obtain acceptable ratings from these testing services.
The books listed on the Jim's Reference Library page under On HTML and Web Development are our references and style guides, particularly Siegel's book: Creating Killer Web Sites.

It was all originally put together on a Sun SparcStation IPX workstation running SunSoft's Solaris 2 Unix operating system. Since then:

From about mid-1999, and for the next ten years or so, Athena, known as Jimsun at the time, was a Sun Sparc AXi-based system, fabricated by Rave Computer, running Sun Solaris 7.
As of January, 2010, Athena was hosted on a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC, running Ubuntu Linux.
In May of 2014 Athena became an ASUS ATX motherboard with a pair of SATA SSDs enclosed in a Fractal Design case, running Linux Mint MATE
In April of 2025 Athena was upgraded to an ASUS µATX mobo with NVMe SSDs enclosed in a Cooler Master Silencio S400 case, running Linux Mint Cinnamon
In ??? of 2026 Jimsun was renamed to Athena. Being as it'd been about sixteen years since the machine had been a Sun box I figured it was about time ;)

With one exception, all original HTML content was generated with Netscape Navigator Gold ver. 3.0 and the Unix vi text editor. The initial page layout and rough "concepting" were done with the former. The latter was used for subsequent modification, fine-tuning, removal and replacement of "Netscape-isms", and so-on. ~~The exception is our "Favorite Sites" page. That is automatically generated from our bookmarks files by a Perl script.~~ Since then everything has been done with straight text editing.

All original graphic art is created with The GIMP. Many thanks to the people who have made this great application possible--and freely available!

During development, and as part of the testing process, new work is checked locally along with the rest of the site collection by accessing it through the Apache Web server we have running on our workstation.

Some of the graphics on Athena have been "lifted" from sites that kindly offer to share their graphics work with others. Foremost among those has been the DCS WWW Image Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science. Our thanks. All graphics are used with permission.

Our original Internet Service Provider was MegaPath, with whom we were quite pleased. Comcast Business High-Speed Internet has been our ISP since January, 2010. We've found their service and support to be exemplary.

And finally: The generous assistance we receive from our friends by way of their critiquing our efforts and suggesting improvements is greatly appreciated.

Comments or Questions?

Created: Aug 1, 1998, Last updated: Feb. 28, 2026