'My other body is a temple'

Bathing With Toasters was born out of the ashes of an old websit that myself, and my friend Olly did about 4 years ago. The content was ok, but it looked terrible, it's still rotting away on the internet here. A follow up version was planned but the whole project lost steam and poor old BPC was left for dead.

Years later, me and olly suggested restarting from scratch, at making a comedy website together, and work started on it December 14th 2008 - It took us a month to decide the name, we reasoned it down to a final two, Bathing With Toasters won by a popular vote from a small amount of people of 15-0. Olly produced some pages, a basic background colour, which still stands now, and some header images and a preloading menu.

Within about 2 weeks, we gained a codemonkey after he pedantically tore apart the bits of bad coding on the incredibly simple home page, so with a 3rd member of our team, work on Bathing With Toasters picked up. It was originally hosted on a free server, to test things out as a live demo. Eventually when we realised we could do no more on the free server, we latched on to Ibzzie's hosting from Light Within, and the main chunk of the site's layout was created in this time. Eventually Ibzzie, stopped paying for his hosting, was no longer contactable, and seemingly disappeared, so after a struggle with our hosts byethost, I paid for the next month's hosting and we recovered the server, so I now host lightwithin, in return for hosting Bathing With Toasters for 4 months.

So now we have our own server, our own domain, and most of the layout up, and now just to populate it with content from the various twisted and contorted minds that I know, and of course my own contribution of cynicism and sarcasm to the world. It's going to be a long time in the making, and currently we are also working on some bonus hidden pages, so look out for hidden links about the place, as there will be a few lurking round the site.

We're not actually sure if Olly is still with us, I assume not, he's dropped off the face of the earth and doesn't contribute to the development forum anymore, so i assume he's busy with other things, but we're doing ok with just the 2 of us, and hopefully we'll hear from him again some time soon.

Epideme (Nick) - 14 July 2009

Well for starters, I'm amazed anyone is actually looking at this page. I should probably get on with the site information before you stop paying attention. If you're interested in the more intricate details of how this website was made, scroll down the page to the page break and read-on from there for the section written by our codemonkey, (We had to feed him with good pizza for that section ...well that, and the Geneva convention means slave labour is frowned up in all the places where it is considered abnormal to sleep with your sister, but we're not based in Tennessee, so we had to feed him)

My role on the site mostly consists, of writing / filming / drawing the content for it. I present Lights, Camera, Destruction with Dan the media... guy. It's a standard Panasonic VDR-D100 camera (UPDATE: Turns out that camera is a pile of shit, so i'm using a Sanyo Xacti HD900, it's not perfect, but it does the job, also, i got pissed off with fucking mini-discs, they can burn in hell!), that we kinda lost the AC Cable too, and will be edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and maybe Final Cut. I also draw and write some of the dX files comics, and write the alt-texts and comments for all of them, the comics are drawn in Adobe Illustrator CS3 with a Wacom Volito 2 graphics tablet, though Killi does most of the arty stuff, I mostly do the comic's concepts and writing (though as of writing there are only 6 comics). The font used in the dX files comics, is a font, called Enigma Scrawl (size 18 being my preferred font size for the comics), it's used in various other places about the site. The secondary font when I want a handwriting font that's not Enigma Scrawl, is one called Journal, but it's used quite rarely.

I also write Nick Vs. World rants, and for that you can use anything that you can type in, Word / notepad, any text editor will do you just fine, obviously.

Any code editting I do, is fairly limited, I leave that to our resident codemonkey for the most part, but I do edit the information pages for posting the comics, rants, videos etc. and I usually add new comments to our random thoguhts generator you see atop every page. When I do bother to do code-y stuff, I use Adobe Dreamweaver CS3. The main part of my contact with actually writing pages will be writing the 'features' pages, and posting new things. I also make, most of the images for this site, which I do, in Adobe Fireworks CS3.

...Let me just say, Torrents are your friends!!!! Should save you £1900 if you wish to use the same programs, not that I am endorsing anything in anyway, at all, ever... well except, cheese on toast ...because cheese on toast is always awesome. (That means you can't sue me Adobe... so suck on that)

Oh, and I use Firefox 3.5 for viewing the site, as that is my favoured browser. I also have IE8, and Opera but they get neglected, so there may be some browser bias in the site towards Firefox, though it usually gets stamped out by our codemonkey, who also campaigns for making the site accessible for people with 800x600 screens, so if you have an 800x600 he is the great man responsible for saving you a horizontal scroll bar when viewing our site, to be fair, horizontal scroll bars are on the list of things no one should ever have to deal with, like Gillian McKeith, Chlymidia, Cillit Bang! adverts and people who say 'guesstimate'.

If there is anything else you'd like to know, send me an email, and I shall endeavour to give you my best answer.

Hope you enjoy the site we've created, it's so far 7 months in the making (as of July 2009), and we've still got plenty of content to upload.

 

Nick (Epideme)

Okay, so you want to know the fine details of how this site was created. You strange strange person. But hey, normal is boring.

Well, the original layout for the home page was written using Adobe Dreamweaver, before I joined the project. I remember the original email I sent Nick, after going through the source code, pointing out redundant <div></div> tags and so on. Dreamweaver's not bad, but it can throw some strange html around if you're not careful. But then, by this point I was using Microsoft Expressionweb, so I can't really talk. Since then, I've turned to the Penguin side of the force, and hence I'm using Gedit right now. I occasionally use Bluefish just to check where my code's going wrong, and I'll start using gVim once I figure out how to use it properly. But for now, Gedit (albeit Gedit with vast hordes of plugins) is the way forward. (I think Nick and Olly both still use Dreamweaver, though.)

The whole site is written in php. http://www.w3schools.com/ has some very good tutorials for html and php; I'd recommend both of these if you're interested in website building. To preview php properly, you won't be able to just open it in a browser normally as you would a html file; you'll need something to compile the code (if compile is the right term here; it might not be). Dreamweaver and Expressionweb both have previewy things, or you could set up an Apache server locally on your computer (there's a tutorial of how to do this in Ubuntu Linux at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP; other linux distributions'll do it differently, and I don't have a clue how to get Apache working in Windows, having tried and failed a few times).

The mouseover effect is whatever Dreamweaver uses for mouseover effects, I think. It was like that when I got here (albeit with different images). If you're interested, there are far neater ways to do mouseover effects; Google is your friend here.

The Google search box was made using the Google thing at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/. Alternatively, you could use the code at http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_add_a_google_search_box_to_my_web_site.html.

The hit counter's from http://www.phpjunkyard.com; I can't remember where I got the Tell A Friend thing from. Google, probably. The forum is phpbb3, and the store probably will be hosted on http://www.spreadshirt.co.uk once we get it set up.

If I've missed anything out, or you're just curious about how I customised anything, send me an email. I'll be happy to send you copies of php source code if you want them. And if you have a website that you want any help with, let me know. I'm a reasonably unsociable student with quite a lot of free time.

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