If any previous visitors recall, this page used to be a long, busy-looking page with a green background. Thanks to some self-tutoring in CSS and Ajax (with Javascript), this page now is substantially simplified, with pretty much the same amount of information.
The images are public-domain stock photos, modified in Photoshop. Two photos make up the overall effect. One graphic is a clear image, and the other graphic has a frosted background to go with the text. The boxes are in CSS, and only one table was used, to separate the dropdowns from the rest of the page.
This page and all text content was edited entirely in vi. In Cygwin, vim and Elvis were used. In Linux, only elvis was used. But mostly, this was edited and patched over a ssh/telnet connection using plain, vanilla BSD vi, with none of the special gizmos that vim and elvis have.
A huge influence in the design philosophy for this site was Eric Meyer, who is a leading authority on cascading style sheets (CSS). After doing some reading of his books, and some surfing to some of his sample pages, I was hooked. Other books and authorities are also credited, especially for ajax: Holzner's "Ajax Bible", Negrino and Smith's "JavaScript and Ajax", and Teague's "CSS, DHTML and Ajax"