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About the Editor

This page contains all the techie bits about how I run the site and all the computers I have had in the past. I cut it out from another page because it was a digression. Isn't HTML wonderful? The hypertext link has got to be one of the best inventions of the latter half of twentieth century. I have to suppose that if you are still reading this that you want to delve into technical details.

Current System:

Main computer (black tower)

Tiny AMD Athlon 64 3000+

512 MB RAM

64 MB (shared) graphics

19" monitor

Windows XP SP2

200 GB hard drive

DVD rewriter

Webcams: various

7 port Belkin USB 2 hub.

Audio: 25 watts per channel Hitachi microsystem with top loading CD, fed by the computer and an Evoke-1 DAB radio (mostly for BBC Radio 4, BBC 7, BBC World Service and Planet Rock).

Cordless optical mouse

1 GB USB drive

IRDA USB dongle to receive files from the laptop.

Network

LAN connection to 1 megabit/sec cable Internet access (ntlworld)

No download limits.

Belkin wireless G router (for laptops) Wired connections to desktop machines.

Browsers

Opera 9.25

Mozilla Firefox 2

Internet Explorer 7

Scanner-Printer: Lexmark X75

Digital Camera:

From 2008 Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX33 8 Megapixel

Previously Olympus C-120 (2.0 Megapixel)

Hand Held

Added January 2006:

Nokia 6260 Symbian phone with video camera and Freedom Bluetooth Keyboard.

Phone used for simple text input using text message facilities, saved as a draft message then uploaded to the PC via pop-port to USB lead. Writing pages for the site in this way is simple and the lack of greater computing power makes for fewer distractions.

The keyboard folds up and easily slips into the hip pocket of a jacket or a pouch within my briefcase which might have been specifically designed for the purpose.

128 and 32 MB memory cards.

Laptop

Gateway 2000 Solo 16 MB RAM Pentium 100

Manufactured 1997

No longer working: floppy drive, CD ROM drive, battery.

Laptop Musings

The first computer I ever owned was an Amstrad CPC 464 64Kb effort with a greenscreen monitor and software loaded via a cassette recorder. It was great. Seriously. It had its own word processor, spreadsheet and database program and it ran lots of fast moving and addictive games. How times change. 64 KB used to be enough for an entire suite of programs, now people turn up their noses at such capacity even in simple electronic organizers.

Next came a rather underwhelming machine, a real PC, with twin floppy disc drives but no exciting software. My third computer was also my third second-hand computer, a real PC with a colour monitor, 30 MB hard disc and some reasonable games, applications and utilities. It ran WordPerfect 5.1 and that was all I needed. But I wanted more. Word Perfect 5.1 was a superb piece of software and it did all the stuff I really needed it to do. I was using it to write newsletters for the business I was running. I got frustrated with a recurring “out of memory” message so I went and bought a new one.

My first new computer was a 486 with 4MB RAM. I very nearly bought one with one of those new fangled CD ROMs on it. (Probably a single speed). But I thought they wouldn't catch on. It came with this miraculous program, Windows 3.1. I had seen an earlier version, or rather my previous computer came with some disks marked “Microsoft Windows”, but the bloke who sold it to me said it was a waste of time, WIMP environments were for wimps. When I got it home I loaded my new pride and joy up with WordPerfect 5.1. Guess what? Same out of memory message. D'oh! This was of course the most expensive computer I ever bought in my life.

But things would never be the same again. Windows made the computer fly. It did what I wanted it to do. New programs behaved like I expected them to do. Windows made the difference. A lot of people slag off Microsoft but I'll give them the credit they deserve. Microsoft software made the computer usable. Usable enough for me to use other company's software to do the interesting stuff. I bought Serif PagePlus version 2 and 3. I also bought Corel Draw 3. These were fun to play with. They awakened a joy for publication in me. Publication, in whatever form, was a pleasure.

I built up the system to run a greyscale scanner, a colour printer (I then regretted buying the greyscale scanner!) My principal interest was in DTP work. I did get to try out the Internet in the old days of Mosaic and 14,400 modems. I was too tensed up about the cost of the telephone calls, I could not just relax and enjoy the experience. If I could have had access to the Internet at a modest monthly cost and free telephone access I might have been creating this site four years earlier.

The next computer I got was the biggest single mistake I made. Technically it was a big advance. It had a double speed CD ROM. It was much faster, 133MHz. It was a Pentium. It had 12MB RAM. But it was rented. The day came when I could not justify the payments for what was then a second rate machine. It had to go back. It was like a bereavement.

For more than a year I was without a proper computer, for the first time in years. This was not the way things should be. You got a computer, later you got a better one. If you could not afford a new one you made do with the old one. But you always had something to use. This was wrong. I had a miserable year. In this year the World Wide Web made big news all the time. I pined. I decided that I must have my own site. It was what I must do. I always enjoyed creating things, publishing, communicating and playing with technological toys without actually getting too involved with boring electronics. It was so obvious. The web was the perfect media for me to play with; International, creative and relatively cheap. A vast playground, a vast audience.

So my website began as all the “How to produce your own website” books and articles tell you; it began as a plan in my head and then on paper. However the reality is that without a computer to play with you cannot know how to do it. You have to practice by doing it.

I finally got another second hand Pentium computer in August 1999. At 120 MHz the processor was the weakest link but it was fairly well specified elsewhere, especially with two hard drives and 48 MB of RAM. While it would only run bargain priced games it still managed to keep up with most of the programs I needed; web creation, browsers, painting and drawing programs. I didn't have any time spare for games anyway.

In June 2002 Rich offered to upgrade my system with recycled bits from his junk collection, he had a lot of hardware that was better than mine for which he had no other use. Waste not want not. The 4 GB hard drive and 32 MB of RAM was transferred from my old machine to the new recycled special which had a good CD ROM drive (40 speed) and a Pentium 200 MMX and a 3 GB hard drive.

In August 2002 Rich completed the second stage of the upgrade, boosting the RAM to 96MB and tidying up the access to broadband (well, 128K) cable and adding a USB card. The USB capability allowed me to add a digital camera and a combined printer-scanner.

Olympus C-120 2.0 Megapixel. 4.5 mm 1:4 Olympus lens. It produces images of 1600 x 1200 pixels, so all images are processed before use on the web. 32 MB Smart Media card.

In October 2002 the hard drive crashed and I needed to get it fixed quickly. Things were desperate, I was off work sick, I had lots of time on my hands and a computer that wouldn't work and a printer/scanner and digital camera with nothing to connect to. Fixing it proved harder than I had expected, and I decided that it was more sensible to buy a newer computer. The K6-2 Compaq was hardly state of the art but it is a beautifully put together computer, very quiet.

In December 2002 a webcam and microphone were added.

At some unknown time ntl silently increased their connection speed from 128 to 150, in August 2004 up to 300k and to 1 Mbit/sec in October 2005 and download limits were removed in January 2006.

In June 2003 I added a 19 inch monitor and a 32 MB graphics card. I needed more screen space and the children wanted the better graphics to run games.

In January 2005 I added a CD rewriter.

In March 2005 I acquired another old computer for a bargain price and tried to network it. This failed and partially screwed things up to the point that I lost my internet connection for everything except browsing. This was the spur I needed to take the next step, to buy my first new computer since I had paid £1300 for a 4 MB 486 back when 170 MB was a big drive and Windows 3.1 was state-of-the-art. The new computer was just a tower and a power lead in a cardboard box, for £499, but what was in the tower was rather tasty. I set up the new black tower PC alongside the old one and used the internet connection sharing options.

Unfortunately the Windows Me system in the Compaq was getting senile and became virtually unusable over the summer of 2005, I was considering getting a new operating system for it when I had a better offer. In September 2005 I got the chance to buy a second hand system based on a 850MHz Athlon running a freshly installed copy of Windows XP. The deal also included a high quality 19 inch monitor, a scanner and a printer. The only downside was that the computer had only 128 MB of RAM which is rather low for Windows XP. Unfortunately the RAM was not the same flavour as any in my now growing pile of “spare” computers. This machine ran too slow to be much use, it is now unused.

2008

New camera:

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX33

8 megapixel, zoom lens, much more capable. 2 GB SD card. VGA video with sound. The most wonderful object I have ever owned.

The second computer has fallen into disuse and the CTX monitor has died, the cheaper generic 19 inch monitor is still doing fine.

There are two laptops in the house now but I don't get to use them.

May 2008

Old laptop (see above) is now back in action after I remember it has infrared capability despite being otherwise severely crippled by having no USB connection, broken floppy and CD ROM drives and a dead battery. My efforts to use direct serial to serial wire connection ended in frustration but the infrared port works and I only need one way to get files out of it and onto my desktop machine.

The Website

I began work on my website as soon as I got that Pentium 120 home in August 1999. At first I used Microsoft Front Page Express. A little later I found Netscape Composer, which has the advantage of having a built in spell checker, which makes the whole process of website creation much easier; just create some graphics in a paint program and Composer will do everything else.

By November 1999 my website was up and running quite well. It was updated regularly and had grown in both size and sophistication. It had also begun to bloat up with large amounts of junk HTML code that was no longer relevant. Also about this time I began to read up about HTML 4, it was obvious to me that Composer was not doing things the right way. I needed to embrace cascading style sheets, whatever they were, and I needed to learn more about HTML. Composer was just a temporary fix.

Dreamweaver

In late December 1999 I got hold of Macromedia's DREAMWEAVER 1.2 free with .net magazine. Dreamweaver has been my main tool for the site ever since. I needed a WYSIWYG HTML editor that handles frames and style sheets and has a built in spell check and link checking tool. I see no reason to bother to change to anything else. I know that there is a huge array of unused power still to be explored within Dreamweaver but I feel more comfortable with doing the basics reasonably well rather than doing sophisticated stuff badly. Many web designers use elaborate features simply to demonstrate that they can, without ever having a reason to need them. If I have a reason to learn a technique I will do so, if not I won't do it.

The best thing about Dreamweaver is that it is as powerful as any other program but it writes such good code. If ever I export material from other programs in HTML format I need to use Dreamweaver's tools to clean up the gruesome code that they write.

All WYSIWYG programs need manual overview, even the best one writes sloppier code than by hand coding. I am not fluent at HTML editing but I have a go at pruning and tweaking the code by hand to keep it clean and reduce the file size. For example removing unnecessary font and align tags, to remove the blank spaces that Dreamweaver is good at creating but bad at removing and for checking that there is not a huge accumulation of redundant code caused when a page has gone through several drafts. Relying on a WYSIWYG program is a recipe for flabby code that might have unpredictable results on some browsers.

Hand editing of code is required for the addition of titles to links, the technique that allows those pop-up text boxes to appear over certain text links when the mouse goes over them.

The graphics I am using are mostly my own creations made with Corel Photopaint 7, which I picked up for a trivial price bundled in Corel Draw Select Edition. It does all the clever stuff for me, cropping, resampling, adding anti-aliased text, pattern fills, bitmap fills and the particular favourite techniques of handling multiple objects and feathering edges. The major plus point for me is in its text handling capabilities, it allows leading and kerning adjustments, which is rare for a bitmap program. I have tried many other graphics programs which did offer some new features but not enough to justify their place on my system and the inconvenience of having several programs for the same task.

Site Promotion etc.

Running a website should always be a balance between creating new material and promoting the site, one without the other is futile. Newsgroup postings not only keep my URL in the public eye they also sharpen up my arguments and generate useful material for the site as well.

Other forms of promoting the site obviously include Webrings and search engines. I use a combination of automated submissions and manual submissions. As I become aware of other search engines I add the details manually, that seems to work well. More recently I have found that I don't need to do a great deal, search engines do the work of keeping themselves up to date, especially Google, which crawls over my site regularly and notes the changes.

Style

I decided to use HTML 4 and the features of cascading style sheets before I came across Dreamweaver. I knew that HTML 4 was the way to go but Netscape Composer didn't allow me to use style sheets and inline style.

I use a single style sheet file to control the appearance of the whole site. The file (machine.css) contains the changes I have made to the standard HTML tags. These include changing the font. Verdana is the chosen font. It is installed as standard under the latest operating systems for Mac and PC alike. I have also given alternative suggestions. I think Verdana is ideal because it is a sans-serif font, no unnecessary bits on the edges of letters, and it looks very clear and crisp on even third rate monitors like mine. I find it slightly more friendly looking than arial but just as readable. I have never subscribed to the common opinion that serif fonts like Times New Roman are easy to read, yes, on paper they are, but nothing I am doing is going to go on paper, I use a screen-friendly font instead.

See my point? The verdana text is much easier on the eye at the small size and low resolutions of a screen. With a higher resolution on paper the supposed benefits of serifs may become apparent but they are not obvious here. The serif font is compact, but it is messy, at least it is on my screen, and I don't assume everybody have the best equipment that money can buy.

I have specified margins with my paragraph text. This gives a lighter feel to the page, making it more inviting to read. Generous side margins and smaller margins above and below each paragraph. More obvious paragraphs increases the "whitespace" on the page, which should make the huge chunks of text seem less intimidating.

I have also changed the paragraph text definition to specify a line height greater than the font height. This leads to a more open page, which should make it less intimidating to the reader and it should also make it easier on the eye to find the next line, further reducing the strain of reading to negligible levels. This can cause problems at times as Dreamweaver has an annoying habit of putting my graphics within paragraph tags if I am not paying enough attention. This has no detrimental effect under Internet Explorer but older versions of Netscape Navigator do not cope well with it, I often end up with pictures over the top of text. Please, if you spot any such problems let me know and I will fix it. Or why not upgrade your browser? Do everybody a favour. Get Firefox or Opera, both are excellent browsers.

When I first started to use style I changed the names of all the tags, but that was stupid. I now stick to standard tags and while these have all been redefined they are still broadly in the same logical size sequence so people using older or stupid browsers can still get some idea of the relative sizes and importance of the headings.

I use inline style only a little but I have used page level style when it seemed appropriate, such as to turn off the underlining of links and to redefine the cite tag on the feedback pages. If it wasn't for HTML 4 my pages would be bigger files and much uglier too.

My pages were not always as stark as they are now...

	A screenshot of The Meme Machine from August 2000, the Meme Machine's first birthday. Lots of pretty colours! What were all those images doing? There are only four bits of text on that page, everything else is a graphic, 11 different graphics. Madness.
	A screenshot from Autumn 2000, showing the large graphic, scrolling javascript banner and the slightly more subtle buttons. I like those buttons, very classy, but the file size was too big to be justified.

The change from graphic rich to a slick text based style was all down to the suggestion of Chris. He offered to redesign my pages for me. He had some interesting ideas which intrigued me. I took his ideas and took them even further. I developed the SpeedText style from these suggestions, it evolved from simply slashing away accumulated graphics to become a whole design concept. The index page was something like 80KB when Chris made his first suggestions. If Chris hadn't annoyed me out of my complacency this site would probably not be what it is now. Thank you, Chris.

Frames

In March/April 2004 I removed the frames from the site. It was a mammoth job, and not undertaken lightly. Frames are a great way of running a website if traffic always arrives on a certain page, they allow a fast and unduplicated navigation system that cannot be achieved any other way. PHP and other server side technologies do not stop the user's browser from downloading many copies of the same navigation links, the fact that these may all be in one file on the server is irrelevant to the user. Unfortunately the way the web has been developing has left frame based websites out in the cold, especially sites like this one which have lots of content and receive traffic sent by search engines to hundreds of different pages. The frames had to go.

Clean Up

In May 2005 I went through the whole site again redesigning the look of the site and making everything that bit crisper and more uniform in appearance.

Brighten Up

In November 2005 I went through the whole site again changing the colour scheme to a white background with lots of pale greys, I also brought the whole visual scheme of the site together more than ever before, removing a lot of HTML and replacing it with CSS.

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© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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