Site Information
I had acquired my domain name several years ago but had left it parked whilst using the name for mail forwarding. In the summer of 2001 I decided to activate it after experiencing trouble with my previous ISP who had hosted my web pages on their free homepages area for the previous year and a half. My experience with them was uneventful most of the time but they had been giving occasional trouble from time to time. Then they actually disappeared totally for about 12 hours one August and their technical helpdesk took weeks to reply to my complaint about the bad service. And then they only sent a standard response saying that I shouldn’t have any problems and giving me a whole list of settings to check at my end!
In my humble opinion, a help desk that doesn’t listen to the problem is worse than useless. Yes, I know many of them have to put up with some pretty dumb people, but they should be able to recognise when someone rightfully complains about lack of service.
I first started my site when someone suggested I should post an account of the VW412 project. So I took advantage of the free homepages and started to learn my way round coding pages the hard way, starting in about October 1999. I added some personal details later and that side of the site is still taking a bit of a back seat!
When I started, I only had a 640 x 480 monitor and was dismayed to find how different things looked on a larger screen. I had placed my images between paragraphs of text which worked fine on the small screen but they ended up all over the place on a larger screen and out of place with the text describing each one. I found the solution with tables, they make it easy to control the layout and keep pictures alongside the appropriate text.
All the pages on this site were originally written using NotesPad – Freeware from Bremer Corp. Their original website disappeared and it was available at NewbieNet for a while, but this too has now disappeared. However, it never responded to the scroll wheel on my mouse after upgrading to Windows XP and I am now using Notepad++ from Source Forge. I tried using various other “clever editors” but they just seemed to make a mess of things, especially with the formatting of tables. I use a lot of tables on this site!
As the project progressed, I found I needed a better way of navigating around, so I discovered frames.
I suffered a lot of trouble after upgrading to Explorer 6 and therefore reverted to Version 5.5 which seemed more predictable. Whilst struggling to get it all sorted out, I tried using the Opera browser. I used version 6.05 which I liked very much and it was my default browser for a long time. It’s faster than Explorer and I like the way it handles multiple windows in one copy of itself (technically, it has a Multiple Document Interface (MDI)) and it also has a built-in facility to block those annoying pop-up windows which actually works! It has a couple of very nifty features useful for developers. You can switch graphics on and off at will to see what the page will look like for anyone who doesn’t accept them and you can do the same with frames to check how your site will survive if anyone out there is still running a browser that doesn’t support them.
When I bought my new system in March 2004 it came with Windows XP and Explorer 6 as standard. My previous system was stable enough on Windows 98, so I had studiously avoided upgrading to ME. Imagine my disappointment to find that Microsoft hadn’t sorted the problems that drove me revert to 5.5 in the first place. For example, when a page is displayed in a frame, the browser “forgets” to allow for the width of the vertical scroll bar which means the text disappears off the screen even though an absolute width has not been specified. This problem was finally sorted out after 2½ years with the release of Explorer 7 in October 2006.
I have tried to make these pages work equally well on all browsers and I have used no features that are proprietary to any particular browser by following the W3C recommendations as well as I can. However, both Microsoft and Netscape have presented me with a few problems and Apple’s Safari exposes errors that the others overlook. So if you have any trouble, please let me know. As one example of what can only be called a full-blown “bug” in Version 6 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, a full width table is rendered in such a way that it doesn’t allow for the vertical scroll bar. So, if the text is full width within the table, it will be too wide for the screen and you will have to scroll horizontally to read it. I have found this problem on a number of commercial sites as well as personal ones – how stupid can you get! I have found two work-arounds, one is to introduce margins and that means I have to code two sets as Microsoft and Netscape handle those instructions differently! The other is to set the table width=95% or a lesser value, but that doesn’t work within a frame.
I have discovered a little program designed to search out and validate links on a given web site and now use this once a month or so to check that none of my external links have disappeared. It verifies my internal links too!
I’ll add more information as it occurs to me. Thank you for visiting my site, I hope you enjoy your time here.