The making of this Home Page

[Making a home page is a lonely and time consuming process. Lonely because you sit there alone in front of your computer and time consuming because you try and try and try again until things start to look the way you want them to look.
And then, it's never completed; there's always something that you could do better; always the weird typo you only notice when your FTP upload is done; always the phrase that says not quite what you meant; always the graphics you could have done more carefully.

The history tells you how this site came to life and started to grow - not in one day, but rather over the last year and a half plus. It's telling its story in a chronological way. It doesn't tell about the tools and programmes I used or still use - thats where this page comes in.

It all started back in 1999 when I was reading an article in a German computer magazine about building of home pages, tools and programmes to use and providers that offer free web space. That got me interested and I wanted to have a go at a web site of my own. I did not want to spend an awful lot of money, I just wanted to have a try. So I looked for things that were preferrably free to be had. The article - it was rather a a feature series the ran - also gave some basics on HTML and it all looked quite simple and straight forward. So I started right away.

The first try I had did - not surprisingly - not satisfy and I had to re-work a lot; I did not start again from scratch, though, I just gradually arrived at the design I'm still using. I don't have the first version of my page any longer, but I don't feel sad about that, it did not really mean much. And of course, I made all the mistakes, fell in most of the traps a novice is prone to fall in, like the old uppercase/lowercase problem of file names that your local Windows installation glosses over, but your web server won't, file type mismatches when uploading via FTP and of course ye olde, not closed HTML tag that shows up only in Netscape, but not in Internet Explorer.

One of the first pieces of sofware I started to use ist Uli Meybohms Phase 5 HTML Editor that I found both simple to use and reliable. Therefore I'm still using it. It's a code editor, so I'm writing my stuff in plain HTML code, which again means that I first had to acquire a certain knowledge of HTML structure and tags. (I have to come clean and confess that I sometimes start to write things using Edit Pad Pro, an even more basic editor.)

For graphics, I'm using a whole bunch of programmes, starting with Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, which I'm using in version 7.02 at the moment. Furthermore, I'm working with Designer 7 when it comes to drawing graphics that are vector based (I'm finally converting them to pixel graphics and polish them up in Paint Shop. Photos are done mostly using Photoshop LE that I got together with my camera, a Nikon Coolpix 950 I bought in summer 2000. The latest addition to my graphics collection is Pixmaker 1.0, a tool that can stitch together single snapshots into true panoramic views.

When it comes to browsers, well like most people I'm using Microsofts Internet Explorer (no need for a link here, I guess), at the moment version 5.5. I'm also using Netscape - you have to, if you're doing home pages - in both its incarnations 4.74 and 6. Opera is a very powerful browser that I use more and more. It's very fast and also less "weighty" than some others that I won't name here. In terms of stability I find it still lacking at the moment, it's no better than the often crashing Netscape. But it's on its way I guess. Just for the fun of it I also have Amaya the reference browser of the World Wide Web Consortium. (it's both an editor and a browser. It does not know about frames, but it will display SVG pictures, CSS2, MathML and XHTML).

As for my hardware, well I'm using a Dell computer with a PIV/ 2.8 GHz processer. It's got one gig of RAM, a Radeon Graphics card, a 120GByte HDD, a DVD player and a DVD Recorder. I'm using a CF Card reader to transfer my pictures from my camera to my hard disk. Connection to the internet happens through a ADSL modem.

Congratulations if you've managed to read on so far :-) A long text with only one image to soften it up. Well, at least one other picture I want to show after all. It's a link to Uli Meybohms Website, where you can download this tiny editor for free. It's only about 880kBytes long and most certainly worth a try :-)

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The making of this Home Page