Welcome to our humble corner of the internet. I’m sure you’re wondering who we are and what this is, so keep reading or jump to History, Authors, or Technology if that’s what you’re interested in.
The Mission (or “what it is, yo”)
Digivation (a bad combination of “digital” and “innovation”) is first and foremost a soapbox for Matthew Smith and Michael Chappell. We write about topics ranging from technology to fraternities (being fraternal men) in what we hope (aspire, dream, etc) to be a legible banter. Of course we are trained as engineers, so you must forgive our occasional technical babble… just pretend we got excited and started talking some foreign language.
telephone power systems to information about hacking WordPress. Most articles are tagged and you can use the search box to quickly locate relevant information (hopefully). If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the site, or something you’d be interested in reading about, be sure to drop us a line (once we get the contact form setup).And as always, we’re glad you stopped by. Now if that isn’t enough information, keep on reading…
History (as it is)
Digivation was born as a spare time project a long time ago (it actually seems like an eternity) by Matthew and this other homeslice by the name of Corey assembled a little “web server” in and hooked it up in Matthew’s closet (way back in 2003) with the intention of creating a website together. The “server” was connected to the ‘net via a nice DSL line (read more about that sort of nonsense here) that worked great for surfing the net (and not so much for hosting a website). The domain “digivation.net” was registered and things got cracking.
Now a period of history exists where Matthew doesn’t recall much about the happenings at young digivation.net until sometime in 2005 when he decided that the do-it-yourself hosting business wasn’t working out too well. The site loaded to slowly to be useful (other than entertaining Matthew’s dreams of grandeur). On the same note, Corey had never been interested in the site much beyond building the little home server, so Matthew bought a real hosting account and installed one of those new-fangled “blogging softwares” and began publishing his thoughts to the world. Times were good.
Then disaster struck. Sometime mid-way through December 2005, some mischievous hackers managed to bring the server hosting Digivation down, deleting all the databases and files associated with the website. Several months of hard work, sweat, blood, and tears (Okay, that’s an exaggeration) – gone. Once the details were sorted out, Matthew decided to try a new blogging platform (the venerable WordPress) and resumed writing in early 2006. If you’re really interested in things from those days, try a little browsing in your spare time.
Fast forward more than a year to the next big milestone in the short history of Digivation in June 2007 when Michael joined Digivation and begin sharing his insights with the world. This development resulted in the great writing effort of July, netting almost sixty posts and a sharp increase in visitors. It also motivated Matthew to redesign the “look” of Digivation to something that is hopefully a little better.
And that pretty much brings us up to date.
The Talent (yea right)
These are the voices behind the words coming out of our fingers. So to speak. Oh, the bios are coming soon, mmkay?
Matthew Smith
Michael Chappell
Technology
So you want to know what runs Digivation?
Software
The main software is WordPress running a custom theme (see below) and paired with Gallery 2 for the photo gallery. These two programs are paired with the WPG2 plugin, which ties together several key areas (such as the user database). There are various and sundry WordPress plugins performing their special magic everywhere you look. If you really want a list of these, ask us.
Theme
The layout is based on Cutline, Sandbox, K2, and takes a few design cues from Hemingway. Being based on a diverse array of themes, the current layout (which we like to call “Lineway”) has diverged significantly from the original themes. Integrating several of Chris Pearsons‘ SEO ideas was one of the first steps (such as employing proper use of H1 and H2 tags). Code tweaking was done all over the place, and the layout was modified quite a bit. Of course you can still see a good bit of the original theme when you look around, but we’ve added several special features to make it better.
At the moment we are not releasing this theme. For other themes by us, visit the WordPress section.
Backend
The backend… well it’s just chock full of all those good things like MySQL, PHP5, Apache, etc etc. We are hosted by WebHostingBuzz (our review), if you wanted to know.
That’s it for now. Anything else?