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About this Site
The navigation font—which seems to change every few days—is Apple’s Monaco (generated by a lightly-hacked version of Apple’s TextNameTool), and the body font is Hoefler Text or Constantia, with leading and letter-spacing tweaks.
This site employs British spelling, and American punctuation.
Almost all the content starts out either plain XML, or SQLite database content that’s almost immediately converted into XML; both are transformed into HTML by XSLT stylesheets via PHP (libxslt does the processing). For better or for worse, it’s all custom software and build scripts. Pretty much everything validates as HTML 4.01 Strict, and a moderate amount of effort has been put into making the site accessible. You get a slightly different version of the site if you appear to be coming from a mobile browser.
Like all of the best and most beautiful people, I now use a Mac—a 15″ MacBook Pro called boom. I am also very fond of the Unix shell. I switch between three editors: jed, TextMate and PDT Eclipse. The code is managed by subversion.
This site is now running on an Ubuntu virtual private server hosted by gandi.net in Paris. This has worked out pretty well so far, though I’ve not been there for very long (since January 2008) so I can’t meaningfully comment. For a few years I used Dreamhost, who are very cheap, pretty good, and very much acceptable for personal sites. (They offer a lot of features, and their customer support is much better than you might think.) Even further in the past, this site was on bund.com.au, a machine administered by the inestimable Andrew “cos” Cosgriff.
We bought beebo.org on 17 June 1999.
About Beebo
Beebo is a character in a series of children’s books. We have three: The House that Beebo Built (ISBN: 0224010913, Beebo and the Fizzimen (ISBN: 0224010921) and Beebo and the Funny Machine (ISBN: 022401093X). Each book starts with Beebo, his buddy Mop, and Mop’s hamster Hector arriving in an unfamiliar town. They work hard and well, whilst keeping mostly to themselves. In his spare time Beebo builds wonderful things out of junk—an enormous pipe organ, a mechanical fire-breathing dragon, an automatic fence-builder.
By about the middle of each book, Beebo and Mop become happy, if not rich … at which point trouble strikes: in the first book their ramshackle mansion finds itself in the middle of a apartment construction zone; in the second, Beebo wakes up one day to find his face on billboards all over town, his stolen image being used to sell soft-drink; in the third Beebo and Mop are expelled from an angry and nameless authoritarian principality for having no visa, no identity card, and no passport.
In each book, Beebo and Mop get fucked by the state. We believe the theme is: the state is bad. We should all thank Philippe Fix, the author, for taking on this thankless task: it’s an important lesson for the pre-10s to learn, and they ain’t exactly getting the message from Enid Blyton, are they? (The third book is particularly bleak—it ends with Beebo and Mop growing smaller and smaller as they descend into earth.) We’re wondering what happened to Mr. Fix himself. Suicide?
Anyway, here’s some pictures of the principals. This is Beebo:
And this is Mop and Hector:
We do not look like any of these characters.
