Background info on ukanuk

I'm an MK from PNG (Papua New Guinea). Specifically, I lived in Ukarumpa and Yemli. I've also spent about a quarter of my life in Minnesota. I'm planning to attend college this fall in the US. However, I might take a gap/bridge year, especially if I can get into 日本 with a program like this.

What's with "ukanuk"?

ukanuk has nothing to do with atomic weapons, even though they are cool enough to inspire my current favicon. Rather, ukanuk is meant to be "Ukarumpa" combined with "nuk", the title for second-born males in Yemli.

Who/What/How did you make this splendiferous site?

First, though it's way off topic, I would like to point out that splendiferous is a real word, originating no later than 1843. I had no clue!

Second, it's not "how did I make" this site but "how am I making" it? This site is a work in progress, and I would love it if you'd give feedback.

I'm using HelioHost as my webhost. If I get enough traffic, I'd eventually like to move to Arvixe and get a TLD, but I've neither the time nor the money to invest at the moment, especially since I'm still actively designing this site. In addition, if I get my own domain I'll probably introduce a few ads to see if they help the website pay for itself.

I use Bluefish for the HTML and CSS; GIMP for textures, backgrounds, the ukanuk logo, and the favicon; FileZilla to upload it to HelioHost's servers; Blender for some images, including the background image for this K'nex video; and Opera (with Dragonfly) to test everything.

I make picture thumbnails with WebMagick. Specifically, I run webmagick --cachedir thumbs --thumbgeometry 1200x300+0+0 --cachegeom 1200x300 && find . -type f | egrep "(index.html|.index*|*~)" | xargs rm && find ./thumbs -name "*-poster.*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm && rm thumbs/276-2165-Omni-Directional-Wheel300x300.jpg in a Linux terminal from the picture directory. This creates a thumbs subfolder with all the thumbnails in it.

To learn everything, I mostly just looked around online. Some of the resources I found particularly helpful for certain issues you can find here.