...or how I make the magic happen

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Last Update: 15th June 2010

This page is a work in progress, and I'll update it whenever I have something to add. I might add some piccies soon!

Current Macs:

None :( As much as I prefer Macs, my last one died (a hacked cheapo Quicksilver G4 from eBay) and there's no way I can afford a new one. *Added 15th June 2010* And having seen the price of the new Mac Mini, i don't think I'll ever buy one again! Ramp the RAM up to 4gig and the hard drive up to 500gig, and you're up to entry level iMac specs, but also up to the same price! What are those people at Apple on?

Currently running a very reasonably priced 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gig RAM, 500gig HD with an Geforce GT220 1gb card. Running Windows 7, which is fast, stable, and the best Mac OS clone yet!

A Brief History of My Webdesign

I first started writing web pages using a copy of Claris Homepage on an LC475 running OS 8.1. I also used Photoshop 4 and a Microtek E3 scanner. The old LC475 was a very capable machine, even in the late 90's.

Until mid 2005 I used WebDesign. WebDesign is a markup editor, so the creation of webpages takes a little longer, but the code is much leaner and cleaner, which means pages load faster.

The advantage of using a markup editor over a plain text editor is the handy colour coding of the code. It's much easier to spot mistakes, and you don't have to remember all those pesky tags.

I've re-edited the existing pages in the Hacks section, taking out all unnecessary tags, and like the rest of the site, the design and layout comes from a stylesheet. This sheet defines the design of all pages, including text style and size, and also the background. This means I can change the whole look of the site by just editing that one file.

I've now switched to Nvu, which is a WYSIWYG html editor. Despite this it manages to create clean html 4.0 compliant code. Not only that, it's totally FREE, and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.

I'm currently trying Dreamweaver, as part of the CS3 Suite. It doesn't like some of my HTML, so I end up editing a lot of it in the Code view anyway. Hit <RETURN> and it starts a new paragraph which splits the boxes on the homepage. Manually use the <br> tag and I have no such problems.

Dreamweaver CS3 regularly crashed on me, so I'm now using the WYSIWYG HTML editor in the SeaMonkey suite. The rest of the suite is mostly redundant, the browser is Firefox, but not up to the latest version, the email Thunderbird, but again behind the times. But the editor is really good, and it should be made available on it's own I think.

The Autographs page was created using Claris Homepage, and and hasn't been cleaned up or linked to the stylesheet. If you view the source (and if you're into HTML coding) you can see it's a very fat piece of code, with a few odd tags that are for Homepage's benefit only. One day I may get around to cleaning it up. Maybe.

I'm using Filezilla to upload my site. It's free and it works! Although there seems to be an update for it *every* time I launch it!

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