“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world:
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw
What is this site? Is it supposed to be funny, or serious?
Is it some kind of mindless ramble or does it contain some great answers
to the mysteries of man?
Yes. All that and much, much more. Enjoy it. Read whichever
bits take your fancy. Take your time, there is a lot of material here.
I don't expect anybody to like every bit.
This is not a web resource, it does not follow a service ethos, or a
profit ethos, it is a work of art. If you enjoy it I am happy for you,
if you don't like it please tell me why, and I might do something about
it, or I might not.
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Our world is full of superstitions, clichés,
rhetoric, myths and traditions that are to some degree based on
wrong-headed thinking. I am not suggesting that most science is
wrong, although I am sure that people looking back on these times
with the perspective of hindsight will find a lot of errors. When
we look back on previous eras it is easy to make fun of fashions,
ideas and trends. I am just getting in first before our children
mock us.
Yes we are stupid, yes we can do better.
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There is no single metaphor running through the site. Much of it is done
with a desire to amuse. Some of it is designed to provoke a reaction.
Some of it is totally serious and designed to change your thinking for
ever, for the better. Unlike many atheists who write websites I am not
rabidly anti-Christian. I am not trying to strike a pose or shock anybody.
My first pages were uploaded to the web in August 1999. They have been
constantly updated and added to since.
In November 1999 my website moved to the Cable and Wireless address and
became for the first time The Meme Machine.
The Meme Machine is also the name of a book written by Dr
Susan Blackmore.
The site is now in its fourth home. The fourth move to mwillett.org
has taken me to fully independent donated webspace and services.
This space is unconnected to my ISP, I can access it at anytime. I am
no longer limited by any formal size restriction. I plan to expand the
site in an organic way, growing in several directions at once as the mood
takes me. In addition I have access to 55 MB of space on the ntl:world
server, this has been used to share some of the bandwidth load, to house
graphics and to host images for bulletin boards and the like.
In February 04 with over a thousand visitors per day coming to the site
I decided to change its name, as you do, to Debate Unlimited.
In March and April 2004 I converted the site to remove the frames which
it used since January 2000. This was a monumental effort.
Frames have great advantages and great disadvantages, I finally concluded
that the disadvantages outweighed the advantages. Looking back I wish
I had never started putting the site in frames.
The site began in my imagination about six months before I began to write
my first page of HTML. It was not until August 1999 that I got my hands
on a computer capable of the task. This was not my first computer, far
from it, not even my first Internet capable computer.
Want the technical details?
These pages are alive, they grow organically. I do not simply add new
material to the end of pieces of text, I change the middle, cut out pieces
and rearrange them, add new sections, cut out a paragraph, split one page
into two or three. On a typical “"editing day”, or day
off work, I will upload as many as 40 files. That is usually only one
or two totally new pages, the rest are minor edits. No other media allows
this way of working. I love it.
The effect that I am trying to achieve
can be summed up in the following way:-
Readability.
This is the most important criteria. I want people to read my pages
so the text must be clear. The font must be familiar, no quirky shapes
to slow down your reading speed. The background must be easy on the eye.
I have found through experimentation that in web design, as in so much
in life, less is more.
The whole point of the web is to communicate. Man thinks in a way that
does not have a language. Simply translating our thoughts into words loses
more than half their meaning. I do not want to lose any more than that.
The English language is the most powerful communication tool ever evolved,
it will have to carry the burden of my message until something better
comes along. Text rules, OK?
I do not fear using “white space” (or any other colour). All
my pages are full of text, scrolling is unavoidable. Once a page is too
big to fit on one screen then there is no benefit to saving page space.
Specifying generous margins and line spacing gives the text an airier
feel, making it less of a daunting read. I wouldn't do this on paper,
that would be a waste of trees, but screen space is effectively free,
so I use it as a free good.
Speed.
I want visitors to enter my site, to browse around all my pages and then
to return at a later date. I know from my own personal experience that
I am likely to get impatient with a site that is full of meaningless graphics
which take precious time to load. The important part of this site is the
ideas, the ideas are expressed principally in text form. I see no reason
to fill my site up with a lot of graphics. A picture may be worth a thousand
words but it also uses up many thousand bytes; which can be a problem
when the Internet is congested and download times become extended.
I have been exceptionally Spartan on the main navigation areas, with
the idea that speed is vitally important until I have won over the visitor
with the content. So the main page is now very sparse. It has been much
bigger and full of script, for much of the time single (irrelevant) images
on the main page exceeded the current all-up byte load of the page. I
congratulate myself when I notice it takes less time to load the page
anew with an empty cache off the web than a previous version takes to
load from the hard-drive on my laptop. Website content must load fast
or it will not be viewed.
Expandability.
I have separated the themes into different sections and sub indexes,
this will allow people to stay with a single idea or theme if they want
to but allows them to launch into another subject very easily at any time.
A totally different theme is only two clicks away.
The use of a single style sheet for the whole site allows me to write
pages each with very little code that still have powerful effects available.
Now new pages can be added which match the look and feel of the existing
pages without me spending a long time formatting them.
Grown up.
I do not want the site to be kewl, hip or happening. The more anybody
tries to be fashionable the more pathetic their attempts seem.
The web is full of garish colour schemes that are unreadable. Some even
hurt your eyes. Many sites are written by spotty adolescents who think
they are lords of cyberspace. They preen
their egos with overblown titles, graphic images and fantasy artwork.
I want my site to stand out because of the content.
This is also done out of a sense of realism. For me to learn all the
tricks to make this site stand out visually on the web today would require
me to spend months experimenting with techniques. All too often other
web site designers use techniques that they do not fully understand to
do things their site does not need simply to show off their ability; and
unfortunately it usually does just that...
Ratings?
The site is aimed at adults. I do not try to lure children into this
site, there is nothing here for them. There is nothing designed to corrupt
or deprave anybody and far worse pages are available for children to stumble
upon. I have no formal way of keeping children out of the site, just as
I don't bother to keep my own children from seeing it, and I see no need
to, children would be bored long before they were adversely affected by
anything this site has to offer. There is some “strong language”
on the site but it is well diluted with a more extensive vocabulary which
should be sufficiently erudite to leave the impressionable ones nonplussed.
If you are a parent or teacher you can rest assured that nothing on this
site is going to encourage any children to be violent, racist, xenophobic,
bigoted, selfish, materialist or uncaring. You can't say that about half
of the stuff on Cartoon Network, can you?
The Visitors:
This site is designed for International consumption, that means at the
very least a third of the visitors will be from the USA. Ignoring that
fact would hinder the viability of the site. Picturing a small handful
of archetypes helps me keep things on track. They are male and female.
Straight and gay. Atheist, Christian and New Age. They use screens from
webTV up to huge monster displays. They use different hardware and different
browsers. I try my best to keep them all happy, which is not always possible
considering the number of antiquated and idiosyncratic browsers that some
people insist on using. I do try to ensure that the pages work in all
browsers as much as possible but it is inevitable that things will be
less good if you use a 256 colour UNIX browser of 1994 vintage than if
you use the latest version of one of the top browsers in full colour at
800 by 600 pixels on a Windows system with the Verdana font installed.
I try to do my best to ensure that although you cannot see exactly the
same as I see at least you get something broadly similar and functional.
If anything is ugly on your system let me know and I will see if I can
improve it.
As far as browsers go I try to keep the site working perfectly in HTML
4.01 compliant browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 and above and Netscape
6+, Mozilla and Opera. If you notice any problems with the site and you
are using an up-to-date HTML 4.01 compliant browser (to the extent that
such a thing exists in the real world) please let me know. Older browsers
and non compliant browsers operate at the user's own risk.
I restrict my text to colours that Dreamweaver regards as websafe
but I use other colours in graphics and for backgrounds, on some
256 colour monitors the backgrounds may be dithered, but this should
not destroy readability. If you are having a problem reading the text
on a 256 colour monitor or because of your poor eyesight then I suggest
that this is more your problem than mine, browsers can be made to change
display options and you are at liberty to copy the text, print out the
pages or alter the colours in the source code if you need to. I will
continue to cater for the majority without being made to feel guilty
about the needs of the minority. But by all means feel free to point
out any stupid colour combinations, I may take notice.
Reading offline
If you find that despite all my best efforts to make things readable
on screen you still would prefer a printed version then I suggest you
do the following:-
First load up the pages you want while online to make sure all the text
you want to read is fully cached, your browser will probably tell you
when the pages are fully loaded. Once the pages are in your browser's
cache you can go offline, if required.
You can choose to print directly from your browser, which can be a bit
hit and miss, or you can be smart and format the pages for easy reading.
I suggest you cut and paste the text into a word processor, highlight
all the text from the heading down to the copyright notice, then copy
(control C) and then paste (control V) into your blank word processor
document. You may be pleasantly surprised to see how well this will be
laid out by default, because I have used standard paragraph and heading
tags, and this can be improved further by selecting a two column layout
which will make it even easier to read in printed form. The final touch
is to go through and eliminate any wasted space around non-existent pictures,
perhaps reduce the font size to the smallest you can comfortably read
then print off a copy. Providing you leave the content unedited and with
the copyright notice in place you can do whatever you want with it for
personal use and give it to anybody when you have finished.
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