About Wise Heat Heating Stove Reviews and Information

Personal Stuff

Before I created Wise Heat, I was like many people looking for a wood stove. I thought wood stoves were about it as far as a what to heat my house and office with, even though I was sure I didn’t want to heat it any longer by payng the gas company. I had heard some things about corn stoves that peaked my interest, but little if anything about pellet stoves or some of these cutting edge oil stoves. For the most part, dealers disappointed me when I got hooked on a corn stove. They seemed to only know about the products they carried while the Web was showing me hundreds… if I could have got my hands on even a couple of them.

The Great Gatsby

With my dog Gatsby at my feet, and thousands of lines of XHTML later, Wise Heat came to be. I thought why not put my day job to use as a Web developer and technical writer to create a site around my love affair with freestanding biofuel stoves. I love the fact that they’re not mainstream and still far from mainstream in the U.S. I love the fact that most of these stoves are quality products, built by engineers similar to those I work with. And I love the fact that I can buy fuel from my local coperative.... In case you're wondering, Gatsby is a Drentse Patrijshond from the Netherlands. He's a great dog and loves biomass too.

The site

This site is called Wise Heat in honor of the smart decisions I’ve decided to make for heating the spaces where I live and work. The site is a Web space for me to gather, collect and post informative news articles, documents, and comments on subjects and heating products that are interesting, useful, and economical to me and hopefully to others who are in the process of deciding how best to heat their living spaces. Most of the information on this site is related to heating stoves and other products for homes, alternative fuels for generating heat, stove usability and know how, and current news in the alternative biomass home heating industry.

I created the the current Wise Heat design and functionality by closely studying how countless blogs look and work. Blogs have become wonderful communications tools, but they have shortcomings. I put together Wise Heat with a blogish feel but with powerful content management functionality behind. Wise Heat will never be temporary or a place for me to chatter on. Wise Heat is more substantial. Comments can become reviews, tips can become articles, etc. Keep an eye on Wise Heat.

Use Wise Heat’s contact form to let me know what you would like see on the site. The messages posted through the form are sent to me personally, and I keep no one’s e-mail address or other privacy information.

Technology

This site is built on a solid foundation of valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, styled with CSS. The XHTML code validates and works cleanly in all modern Web browsers, including Internet Explorer. I’m continually in the process of validating the code to W3C specifications, so if you see errors in validators, know that I'm ironing them out. Why is this important? So that you know Wise Heat is a professional Web site, just like the site’s content.

A modern web browser like Firefox, Safari or Opera is needed to make the most out of this site, but thanks to the separation of content and presentation it should be accessible to most browsing devices.

The publishing system I use is Xaraya , version 1.1.2. I also use a whole bunch of plugins and side technologies: ImageMagik, Regex, ModRewrite, and no doubt a few I have forgotten about.

XML Feeds

You can use a news aggregator to keep track of updates to Wise Heat by subscribing to the RSS Text Feeds. I include feeds for the Wise Heat home page and main offshoots: wood stoves, pellet stoves, oil stoves, and corn stoves. If you’re using an RSS compatible browser, bookmark these feeds. They are living and growing all the time.