Our website

The LWS website was designed and developed (and continues to be lovingly cared for) by our very own Eric Carlson. However, this effort was (and is) only possible because of the work of many, many others.

The design is loosely based upon one by Rob Reed of F5 Design, who built and hosted a site for LWS from 2010 until late 2011. We owe many thanks to Rob for the original version of the LWS orange tick mark logo, the colour of which was going to be sky blue until it was changed to match the girl's shirt in the (stock) photo that we chose for the home page. The logo was subsequently redesigned for use in a wider range of media by Kristina Morris of Coffee Kids (one of our favourite charities) before finally being fashioned into its current form by Maria da Gandra of Mwmcreative.

The current website uses (directly or indirectly) a great many software technologies: Node.js, CouchDB, Express, the 960 Grid System and jQuery as well as other bits and bobs too numerous to mention. These in turn depend on things such as Google's V8 JavaScript engine and – crucially for security – OpenSSL. The bulk of the website is written using a combination of ECMAScript (also known as JavaScript), Jade, Stylus and CoffeeScript. The latter three are in turn used to generate much of the the HTML, CSS and JavaScript, respectively, that are sent to your web browser. The source code itself is written using the Emacs text editor and maintained using the Git distributed version control system on computers running Ubuntu, a flavour of Linux. None of these would themselves be possible were it not for programming language tools such as Erlang, Perl, Python and the giant upon whose shoulders they all stand, GCC. These underlying technologies are all open source, and we would like to thank the authors of – and contributors to – each and every one of these many projects for making such wonderful tools available so that humble people such as us may use them freely.

For more information or if you have comments or suggestions about the website, please feel free to contact Eric.