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About Matchamonkey.com
Author
MatchaMonkey is a 20-something world traveler who has lived in southern France, western Japan, and most recently northern France. Next stop--Harlem, or at least NYC, sans housing or money, where she hopes to get herself an education so she can live abroad without having to teach English. Her trusty travel companion--a French-speaking monkey with a passion for trains--is always at her side, usually hogging the camera and the attention.
Though never one to reveal much of herself to strangers, MatchaMonkey decided to start this blog after being criticized for the dirtiness of her garbage. "People," she thought,"must know of the absurdity of our daily interactions with the Japanese people." Luckily, she continued to find plenty of material once she moved to France.
Even after all the abuse she's taken over the last 4 years, MatchaMonkey hopes to end up working abroad someday. But in the meantime, she's sure the next two years in grad school will provide her with plenty of musings for the blog.
Photos
Photos on the blog are mostly taken with a Canon EOS Kiss XTi 10.1MP digital SLR camera. You can find more information about individual pictures in the information box in the gallery section as well. There is usually a little post-processing done on the images in Photoshop, but nothing major.
Code
Matchamonkey.com was coded and developed by by the webpandas over at Michaelpanda.com using more or less valid XHTML 1.0 transitional. This is to say that we tried our best to stay standards-compliant, but didn't feel the strictness of XHTML 1.0 was totally neccessary. Standards compliance is important however, and for this reason, the vast majority of the pages on the site are W3C validated (you can check for yourself by clicking on the xhtml icon at the bottom of such pages).
Matchamonkey.com uses valid cascading style sheets for all layout/design on the site, which means there's a chance it might look slightly quirky on older browsers with incomplete css support. we have tested it for compliance not only with w3c standards, but also for useability and consistency on modern IE and gecko rendering engine based browsers. If you're having problems viewing the site with an older browser, it might not be a bad idea to upgrade to a newer version, as style sheets are fairly ubiquitous and will only continue to be more so in the future.
Accessibility
Matchamonkey.com is not a big corporate website and while some attempt was made to ensure that elements degrade nicely in the absence of style sheets or when viewed through a screen reader/text based browser, absolute and full section 508 compliance was not a number one priority for us. In particular, the lack of CSS support for vertical text means that the text in the main navigational "side tabs" on the right hand side of the site will not resize with most other text on the site.
This navigational menu was constructed using Mike Rundle's "Accessible Image Replacement" technique and thus, on the extremely rare chance that you have disabled images while leaving css enabled on your browser, the top navigation menu will be unuseable. Nothing can be done about that, other than me shaking you violently about and asking "why on earth would you do such a thing!?". So in such a case, please either turn back on your image support, turn off your css support or else use a straight up text-only browser. Thank you.
If you find some section of the site which is inaccessible to you for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to see what we can do to fix it.
Software
The blog is set up using sixaparts excellent "Movable Type" software, and modified using scripts, modules and plugins from Scriptygoddess, James Seng and Jay Allen, among others. The gallery itself runs on the wonderful Singapore image gallery backend with a bit of tweaking here and there. All of the templates and code on the site are hand coded by Michaelpanda using a jEdit and textwrangler.
All images and backgrounds on the site were hand crafted by yours truly pixel by pixel using Adobe Photoshop 7.0, with the notable exception of the cute icons which appear on some of the sidebar menus and in a few other places through out the site, which created by Dan Cederholm at Simplebits.com
Disclaimer
Matchamonkey.com is (c) 2006 - whateveryearitisatthemoment, all rights reserved. So please don't steal anything on our site, including text, images or code. If there's something on the site you'd really like to use, why not drop us an e-mail? Chances are we would have no problem with you using it and can often provide you with a bigger resolution copy (in the case of images) or a more in-depth original (in the case of text).
Feel free to link to any page/entry on the site - we don't require you to "come in through the front door" as it were. However, please don't "hotlink" to a file or leech our bandwidth - it's simply not cool to link directly to an file hosted on someone else's website. Be a good person, ask for permission to use an image, and after we respond, find your own host and upload it there.
The views expressed on Matchamonkey.com are our own and are in no way representative of those of our employers, either past, present or future. (please god, will someone please hire us so we can afford to buy food one of these days?)
On the other hand, what you write in the comments form/message board are your own opinions, and except for cleaning up messy urls, and changing naughty words into less offensive alternatives, we won't edit your comments. By the same token, this also means that we bear no responsibility for whatever people write in the comments/message board area. Their views are not our own and just because something's on our site doesn't mean we agree with it - supporting free speech means not censoring views that may be contrary to your own.
Your IP address is logged everytime you visit the site, and it along with any information you provide to us, either when e-mailing me or in your comments submission form - remains private and will never be displayed on the site. Of course, if you voluntarily enter a URL in the comments form, this will be linked to your name.
We hate spammers with a passion and we promise we won't sell your name to mass marketers, send you e-mails about natural herbal viagra or even give up your information to the government. And we've got a well trained army of warmonkeys to back us up too, so you know we're not bluffing.
We're running Jay Allen's excellent MT-Blacklist and James Seng's fantastic captcha script to try and weed out the tons of comment spam that would otherwise infect the comment sections of blogs. Nonetheless, occasionally a bit of advertising might slip through, though these will be deleted in short order.