About
GaslightAndSteam.com is the personal website of David Bennett. It includes examples of my professional work, files and examples for public consumption, and a blog of my thoughts and ideas. Within the blog, you may find posts that delight and amuse, answer some technical question or merely make you shake your head at the technical naivete and lack of knowledge expressed. In the latter case, I hope you would feel compelled to comment and share any helpful comments pointing out a best practice or better way of doing things. The views in the blog are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of my employer or any individuals to whom I might link or otherwise reference.
If you’ve come seeking David Mcmasters, you’re in the right place. With my marriage, my wife and I legally changed out last name to Bennett rather than complicate things by trying to hyphenate our names or have one of us take the other’s name. My hope is that this change is so well-documented that genealogists in future generations won’t curse my name. Given that even Mcmasters was apparently once Mcmaster and that my mom’s maiden name of Mustain is variously spelled Mustein, Musteen etc., I doubt such will be the case.
Colophon
This site was developed using open source tools and runs on WordPress using MySQL. The WordPress template is an original design that’s been customized to fit my needs and all graphics and images are also original (except for logos and the like which are the copyright of their respective companies). I maintain a local development site and migrate content, custom components and files using MySQL imports and exports along with FTP (my preferred tools being either FileZilla or WinSCP – connections over SSH being preferrable). The previous version of this site used a Joomla! front-end with WordPress for the blog, but static pages and the improved handling of media made using a heavyweight CMS unnecessary, so I removed it and shifted WordPress to handle the entirety of the site.
The primary site development tools I use are WAMPServer, Notepad++ and Photoshop. WAMPServer is used to run and develop the site since it gives me the full stack of Apache, MySQL and PHP. I hand-code my pages and components despite having tried both Eclipse and Dev-PHP2 sicne I haven’t found anything that really works well without hogging resources or getting in my way more than it helps.
The site is hosted on Dreamhost along with other domains I manage. They’ve been a great host and I really appreciate all the development tools available including the ability to host unlimited MySQL databases.
Here’s a short list of the tools I use or have tried:
