Colophon

General · October 15, 2001

Version

Current version number is 2.0.3. (Change log…)

Design

Unveiled to the public on December 21, 2004, the site’s current look and feel was designed with our readers’ comfort in mind. The cold, soft colour scheme, minimalist layout and resizeable type contribute to an overall more pleasant reading experience.

Text is set in Georgia, a wide, elegant, highly readable font by celebrated type designer Matthew Carter. If Georgia is absent from your computer, you may wish to download it from the web, otherwise another sans-serif font will be used. Content is also made easier on the eyes thanks to Dean Allen’s Textile plugin, which converts plain text punctuation into professional-looking typographic marks.

Background pattern courtesy of squidfingers.

Software

Fantastic Metropolis is coded in PHP and uses the WordPress semantic publishing platform. While originally intended for weblogs, WordPress is a very flexible tool and we found it more than adequate for managing a webzine such as this. Not by itself, of course, which is why it’s complemented by the following plugins:

  • Archiviste, by Luís Rodrigues, is a big and ugly chunk of code inspired by narchives. It compiles lists and lets you sort them by the contents of a custom field, among other nice things;
  • Full Content by Shelley Powers displays multipage items on a single page;
  • Get Custom by Scott Reilly, with modifications by Luís Rodrigues. It retrieves custom fields from the database and is one of the most useful plugins on this site;
  • HeadMeta by Dougal Campbell adds <link /> and <meta /> tags to page headers based on custom fields.
  • Last Name First, by Luís Rodrigues, reconfigures names and titles so they behave when sorted alphabetically;
  • Textile by Dean Allen is our favourite electronic typographer around these parts;
  • Wiki Links by Jens Alfke, makes linking tidier and easier. It didn’t do what we really wanted, so Luís modified it to do what we really wanted;
  • wpPaginate by Scripty Goddess, with extra options added by Luís Rodrigues. The Archiviste’s best friend, helpful when navigating long item lists.

Web standards

Fantastic Metropolis adheres to web standards and should validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. CSS3 layout and RSS feeds are likewise valid.

Web hosting

This site is hosted by Axign Consulting in tandem with Moorcock’s Weekly Miscellany. Our thanks to Moorcock’s webmaster Berry Sizemore for sharing the space with us.