About the Web site
I believe in creating most sites from scratch. Thanks to a perfectionist complex and a strict professor, all of my web sites are homegrown xHTML and CSS with no html styles. I also steer away from any type of template or content management systems, especially for a project as small as this one. This web site was mostly created with PHP with several backing database tables and a few javascript tricks.
The backing database only has three tables. My original plans involved a fully normalized setup complete with several repeating tables, but the current setup ended up being infinitely easier to work with. All of the pages have some data being pulled from them, whether to validate the url, check for driving distances, or displaying the links to images.
Every bit of html is created with PHP. Using this, I was able to pull, parse, and display all of the data easily and use a single php script to show, say, every waterfall. This was my first large site using PHP functions as well, which ended up being very incredibly helpful with the standard renaming (normal to url to sql format) and tedious html coding (the image gallery).
Another new thing on this site is mod_rewrite. Instead of pulling information through sessions or direct pages, every page is actually a coded series of get commands pulling information from the database. There is actually only six pages behind the scenes, and I've considered bringing it all down to one for the elegant simplicity of it all.
The only two scripts on the site I did not fully create are the main javascript functionality - the home page slide show and the photo zoom on the galleries. I'm not too familiar or fond of javascript, and instead of fumbling around for several months to reach the stability that these two scripts had, I simply edited these scripts a bit to use here. The other bits of javascript, including the Google Maps API and the AJAX functionality, were written by me.
I've been working with programming languages since the Summer of 2007 and now work a full time job at Michigan Tech as a web developer. I work with many different languages, including Oracle SQL, Javascript, PHP, xHTML, CSS, and Actionscript. For more information about my professional side, see my site at jacobemerick.com.