I had hesitated to learn anything about web pages for a long time, since I simply assumed that writing web pages was complicated, akin to writing a computer program (I’m very good at writing computer programs and I enjoy it, but it’s extremely time- consuming). Then, one day, out of curiosity, I looked at the HTML source code of a page I was visiting (most browsers let you do this with an option on a menu somewhere—on Internet Explorer, it’s an option on the View menu). HTML, or Hypertext Mark-up Language, is the name of the language used to define web pages—it is simpler to use than the name makes it sound. Once I discovered how simple it was—essentially just plain text, with a couple of special keywords thrown in—I started writing pages of my own. One weekend, I built a 30-page site from scratch for my unit at the office, and from then on, there was no looking back. That was over two decades ago now, in the days when the Web was still in its (relative) infancy.

For reference material, I mostly just looked at Microsoft’s web site, which has some sections on web authoring. All I really needed was a list of the various HTML “tags” (keywords), and the rest was easy to figure out. Today you can find this information everywhere, not just on Microsoft's site.

[Return to Summary]

I originally used Windows Notepad. Remember, HTML is just text, so using Notepad isn’t as primitive as it sounds. (In fact, most experienced Web developers today continue to use very simple tools, such as a simple text editor and FTP.)

Today, I use the excellent UltraEdit text editor to create and edit pages, and the SecureFX FTP client to upload them to my Web site.

[Return to Summary]

No. Most of them seem to take longer to learn than HTML itself would. I don’t bother with them, and I know I’m not alone among web authors in this respect.

Some other programs (spreadsheet programs, word-processing programs, etc.) can generate web pages directly from one of their documents, but my experience has been that these tools generate very messy HTML code, which I find to be more trouble than it is worth to integrate into a site. This is still an option if you have large volumes of information to convert from a different format into a web page, though.

I've tried and discarded some web-authoring programs. They are too bloated and expense and complex, and all one really needs to create a Web site is a text editing program and some sort of program to move the Web pages to and from the Web server. That's all.

[Return to Summary]

There are a number of tools that I use for the building of my site. All of the images on my site today are prepared with Adobe Photoshop 5.0; I have used Microsoft Image Composer 1.5 and Paint Shop Pro 5.0 in the (distant) past, but Photoshop has been the only tool I’ve used for the past decade. I've never "upgraded" these products because they already do everything I need.

I very occasionally use Adobe Streamline 4.0 to convert scanned or bitmapped images to vectorized art, except in special cases, when I convert them by hand. This isn’t a situation that arises often.

Adobe Photoshop is the well-known Cadillac of programs for processing of still images. No other product really comes close. However, it’s very expensive, so it may be overkill for web authoring—still, you get what you pay for with Photoshop, so if budget is not a concern, why not? I use Photoshop exclusively now, since I have it. Of course, Photoshop is the only real choice for work in other media (especially print work—neither PSP nor IC can handle this adequately), but that’s not a concern if you are just authoring web pages, as I am. I use Photoshop 5.0 under Windows XP and it flies. I’ve seen no reason to upgrade to more recent versions, and many reasons not to (such as the fact that the rootkit installed by the latest Photoshop CS version can corrupt disk drives).

Outside the domain of processing existing images, it is sometimes necessary to draw images from scratch. For that, I use Adobe Illustrator 8.0, although I haven’t done much original illustration on my site (mainly just the small buttons I use to illustrate navigation links). I use Illustrator for some of my Various Documents, though, and I used it to create two pictures in my Art Gallery: Drawing of Enigmatic Woman in a Beret and Technical Illustration were created entirely with Illustrator.

There is one other little tool that I find handy for images: GIF Animator, which is another product bundled with FrontPage. It makes it easy to create and maintain animated GIFs. I almost never prepare animated GIFs nowadays, but when I do, I use this tool to do it.

There are also some nice tools around for preparing server-side and client-side image maps, but I currently don’t have too many mapped images on my site (mainly because they can interfere with accessibility for some visitors), so I don’t have any strong preferences in this area. I’ve used the excellent Map This! freeware program in the past, and that got the job done for most purposes. I downloaded its commercial successor, LiveImage, but it requires a raft of MFC DLLs that the authors apparently didn’t see fit to include with the product, and since I’m tired of having to replace half the DLLs in my system every time I install something just because the developers couldn’t handle standard C++, I haven’t bothered to do anything with it.

The ray-traced images on my Art Gallery pages were created with Pov-Ray for Windows, a superb—and free—ray-tracing program. The photographs on my Photo Gallery pages were taken with both digital and film cameras (mostly the latter), and were modified for use on my web pages, mostly with respect to gamma correction, color balance, and exposure changes, depending on the source of the original image (film or digital, and type of camera), using Adobe Photoshop 5.0.

Most of the PDF files on my site were created with the full version of Adobe Acrobat 4.0, using Acrobat Distiller 4.0. Yeah, that’s an obsolete version, too, but it still does the job, so who cares? I recently was forced to upgrade to Acrobat 7.0, but I still generate most PDFs to be compatible with Acrobat 4.x or beyond.

The small amount of audio content on my site was prepared mostly with Audacity or Sony Sound Forge. The videos on my site (hosted by YouTube) are mostly edited in Sony Vegas or (for early videos) Corel VisualStudio.

You’ll notice that many of the version numbers of these tools are not current. I haven’t updated many of them in years. They all work nicely for me, and so there is no reason for me to upgrade any of them. See my page on The Reliable PC for a more detailed explanation of why I don’t blindly upgrade software every time a new version becomes available.

[Return to Summary]

The biggest problem is keeping the entire site coherent, with clean navigation, consistent formatting, and links that all work correctly.

If you'd like to see what happens when people don't pay attention to these things, check out Web Sites That Suck. I like to think that I'm not making the terrible mistakes that these other sites make. My site can even be navigated with a text-only browser, something that would be totally impossible with many other sites on the Web.

[Return to Summary]

[Return to Summary]

I test the site using Firefox, MSIE, and—rarely—Opera. I occasionally test it with lynx to verify accessibility.

[Return to Summary]

Most of my site is set in Verdana, a typeface developed for Microsoft and intended especially for computer displays. You probably already have this typeface installed if you are running recent Microsoft products. You’ll only see the text on my site in this typeface if you have it installed and if your browser supports style sheets, though; otherwise, it will appear in whatever default typeface your browser supports. I don’t use embedded fonts at present, since there is no one method of embedding that covers both the major browsers.

Things like links and headings are set in Arial (usually Arial Bold). This typeface is provided with all Windows products, so you probably already have it, if you are using a Windows machine. It looks very much like Linotype’s Helvetica typeface family. I actually prefer Helvetica, but visitors to my site are much less likely to have it on their machines, and it seems to render poorly in very small sizes (compared to Arial).

The running text in my pages is set primarily with a font size of 12 pixels.

The pronunciation keys used on some of my pages are designed for fonts that provide support of Unicode IPA Extensions. On recent Windows platforms, Lucida Sans Unicode is sufficient (and this is what I specify in the CSS). I also specify Arial MS Unicode, Doulos SIL, and Hiragino Maru Gothic Pro to accomodate older machines and Macs.

The typeface used in the main banner of my site and the opening graphic on my home page is Contemporary Brush Bold. The images themselves were prepared with Photoshop.

I don’t use any form of downloadable fonts because there is no real standard, and few people are equipped to use them, and they are just too much of a pain. If I want a specific font, I’ll use PDF instead of hypertext.

[Return to Summary]

Those are symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) a special alphabet used by linguists to accurately transcribe the exact pronunciation of words or phrases in any language. Each symbol stands for exactly one sound, no matter what language is being transcribed. Many dictionaries use the IPA to give pronunciations of words (although English dictionaries, for some reason, often don't).

In order to see the symbols properly, you need a Unicode font on your computer and a browser that can handle the special characters. If you are using a recent version of Windows or the Mac, you probably already have an appropriate font installed. As for browsers, the last time I checked, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera all seemed to work okay. Here's this entire paragraph in IPA:

[ɪn oɹdɚ tu si ðə sɪmbl̩z pɹɑpɚli ǀ ju nid ə junɪkod fɑnt ɑn joɹ kʌmpjutɚ ænd ə bɹɑʊ̯zɚ ðæt kæn hændl̩ ðə spɛʃl̩ kɛɹəktɚz ǁ ɪf ju ɑɹ juzɪŋ ə ɹisn̩t vɝʒn̩ ʌv wɪndoz oɹ ðə mæk ǀ ju pɹɑbəbli ɑlɹɛdi hæv æn əpɹopɹiət fɑnt ɪnstɒld ǁ æz foɹ bɹɑʊ̯zɚz ǀ ðə læst tɑɪ̯m ɑɪ̯ tʃɛkt ǀ fɑɪ̯ɹfɑks ǀ mɑɪ̯kɹosɒft ɪntɚnɛt ɛksploɹɚ ǀ ænd ɑpɹə ɑl simd tu wɝk oke ǁ hiɹz ðɪs ɛntɑɪ̯ɹ pɛɹəgɹæf ɪn ɑɪ̯ pi eɪ̯]

[Return to Summary]

[Return to Summary]

There is also some scripting in the banner for the site that attempts to reference various plug-ins (all ActiveX components, on the Internet Explorer browser), in order to compile statistics. Usually I have it turned off, but sometimes it's turned on in order to gather a few statistics. You can say "no" to the prompt in this case with no effect on your browsing experience, if you wish.

[Return to Summary]

The attempt to eliminate frames in HTML 4.x, by the way, was one of the biggest steps backward I’ve seen in HTML design specifications—truly the W3C seems disconnected from the world at times.

[Return to Summary]

[Return to Summary]

There isn’t actually anything racy on my site; both of the ratings I’ve put on the site are valid for everyone. ICRA seems to have a pretty solid and reasonable rating system, although it keeps changing its name. SafeSurf describes itself as an organization run by and for parents, for better or for worse.

Lately ratings seem to have fallen out of fashion, but I keep my ratings, anyway.

[Return to Summary]

[Return to Summary]

[Return to Summary]

My main desktop machine is a home-built PC loaned to me by kind friends (I can't afford to buy a PC of my own these days). It replaced another PC, a very inexpensive off-brand that I got because I couldn’t afford anything better, and which failed after only a short period of semi-reliable service.

My production server is also a home-built machine loaned to me by the owner. Its predecessor (another off-brand machine) nearly caught fire when the motherboard shut off the processor fan and let the temperature rise to 300° F on the processor. I built the server in exchange for permission to use it from the people who own it. It works pretty well, even though some parts are held together by tape. This server handles my e-mail, my Web site, and many other things. It runs under the excellent FreeBSD UNIX operating system, an OS preferred by many Web sites the world over for its robustness and reliability (not to mention its low cost: FreeBSD is free, like the name says, whereas Windows servers start at around $900, making it more expensive than many hardware configurations), although Linux hype is making some unhappy inroads on this.

[Return to Summary]

I run FreeBSD (a type of UNIX, although it doesn't actually call itself UNIX because that requires an expensive trademark license) on the production server, and Windows XP Professional Edition on the desktop.

Windows XP (a descendant of Windows NT) is good for desktop production use, and it has always met my requirements. It carries many of the advantages of NT, but it has been dumbed down and prettified quite a bit, and it requires ”activation,“ which is Microsoft’s first step towards making you pay for the very same software forever.

I don't run Vista, Windows 7, or any of their successors, and have no intentions of "upgrading" to them. I prefer to let others make that mistake.

As for FreeBSD, FreeBSD (and UNIX in general) is great for servers, which are quite a different breed of application; Windows is very expensive for that sort of use, and does not provide the same bang for the buck or ease of administration. I’m not religiously devoted to any operating system, so I use whatever is best for a given purpose. FreeBSD currently is a winning solution for servers from a technical standpoint. Unfortunately, FreeBSD is unsupported, and trying to deal with other users of the OS or the people who control it is a nightmare—like the Linux community, they are fanatically devoted to their OS and will tolerate no differences of opinion, or even any questions that they find less than gushingly complimentary of the system. As a result, I've had to recommend against it when consulting for other organizations in a professional capacity. You can't use an operating system in a mission-critical capacity if the only people who can support it for you throw tantrums when you talk to them. But if you are good at getting along on your own, it's a fine choice.

As for upgrades, well, since the machines are stable and do everything I require, I don’t have any current plans to upgrade anything. It's best not to fix what isn't broken.

[Return to Summary]

Sort of. My web site was hosted by a U.S.-based company that provides dedicated web-hosting services (as opposed to an ISP or an online service like CompuServe, neither of which are usually conscientious enough to guarantee decent web performance and accessibility). This company provides excellent service and bandwidth at a reasonable price, and as a result my site was perpetually and rapidly accessible from anywhere. (Send me feedback if you want a reference, although it has been a few years now.) The production server was a FreeBSD host running an Apache web server, just like my current production server. This company managed the physical server and most of the most fundamental administrative tasks; I managed the rest.

Unfortunately, when I went bankrupt in 2002, I could not pay for my production server, and the hosting company pulled the plug, understandably. I then started hosting my site on my own server, but the only cheapo computer I could afford failed after only two years or so. Today I'm using a computer loaned to me by friends, since I don't have the money to buy my own anymore. The bandwidth of the server is extremely limited, so my site is very slow. I hope to return the site to a server with a fast pipe connecting it to the Net someday (nowadays, the speed of the Internet connection is far more important for most Web sites than the size of the machine actually hosting the site), if I can ever dig up the money. In theory I should be able to run my own server as long as I can afford a Net connection of sufficient speed, but the latter is the expensive part. Indeed, these days I can't even afford the PC, but I've been able to borrow one for now.

Currently, it’s potentially very expensive to put your own server on the web yourself, especially if you are just running it for your own personal use—not because computers themselves are expensive (they aren’t), but because the telecommunications charges are still too high to make it practical. It also raises security issues that are a pain to keep on top of when you are running your own machines (unless you have nothing else to do). In my opinion, web-hosting services will be around for quite a while (although traditional ISPs have nearly disappeared, as telecom companies take over the function of providing a client connection to the Net).

I use a test server for prototyping and testing, and then I move completed content by hand to the production server. I run Apache for both servers.

[Return to Summary]

I receive about 150,000 unique visitors per month on my site these days, which is just under 2 million visitors per year. There are about 936 pages on the site and around 273 million bytes of information (a lot of it in the form of pictures).

The site probably represents about 6000 hours of labor and would cost between $600,000 and $700,000 to build from scratch if I hired someone to do it (the photo pages, in particular, have a great deal of labor and materials behind them). However, since I built it myself, it has cost me only time, not money (which is good, since I don’t have any money).

My site has been arguably one of the most heavily visited personal Web sites on the Web, and is certainly in the very top percentile of such sites (since most personal sites rarely get any visitors at all). There's more and more competition, though, and funny things are happening in the search engines, so the traffic is somewhat less than it was a few years ago. I'm not exactly sure why.

[Return to Summary]

I have to admit, though, that the latest versions of Firefox and MSIE are much more compliant than older browsers were, and so I'm gradually moving towards compliant, standard HTML.

[Return to Summary]

Even if the site were intended to be accessible to French visitors, the fact that obtaining a domain name in .fr requires jumping through the most ridiculous set of administrative hoops imaginable—far beyond what such a worthless TLD justifies—means that I would have no desire at all to obtain a .fr domain name. It even costs about ten times more than a .com or .org domain name, when you can get it at all. It’s such a pain that even many French companies (and in fact even many French government agencies) prefer to obtain domains in .com or .org rather than .fr. The policy was recently liberalized, but now the world has largely passed France by, so I don't know if it will ever catch up, and in any case I still don't care about a .fr domain myself.

The French are very, very behind in matters of the Web and computers in general; many of them still don’t have e-mail yet, not even in their offices, and many still do not have a PC at home, although this is changing slowly (Internet cafés are are starting to close down, as people get their own computers). Also, freedom of speech and expression is considerably greater overall in the United States (usually), and this, too, favors publication of the site in the U.S. (even though I don’t really put anything controversial on my site). Finally, French jurisprudence is so restrictive and hostile to photographers and publishers that it is almost impossible to conduct either type of activity in the French market itself.

Given all this, it would be pretty pointless for me to set up a site in French in a French TLD. Maybe when France moves out of the Dark Ages with respect to cyberspace and intellectual-property law, I’ll consider it. Unfortunately, the world seems to be moving more towards the extreme French model than away from it.

[Return to Summary]

[Return to Summary]

I do have a separate Services section of my site that describes services I perform for a fee. However, those are independent of the site itself, which remains free (and paid for by me personally, with occasional handouts from others).

If you follow one of the links on my Book Reviews or Movie Reviews pages to Amazon.com and buy a book or movie, I get a small commission on the sale of the book (you pay the same price either way). However, I haven’t really ever made any money from this, and I don’t realistically expect to; the purpose of my site is not to sell books, after all.

[Return to Summary]

The ESL Private section of my site contains proprietary lesson materials that I use for my ESL teaching activities. I use it myself at client sites to download and print the materials if I need them and I don’t have them on hand in hard-copy form. The documents in this section are not suitable for unrestricted distribution, so I’ve locked this section (but I have a public ESL Materials section that contains the public stuff).

The Site Statistics section just contains statistics on site traffic. I'm not exactly sure why I've password-protected it; I might eventually make it public. But would anyone else care? (Indeed, is anyone reading this page?)

[Return to Summary]

If I haven't already corresponded with you, the feedback page is more reliable, because e-mail sent directly to my address can get stuck in spam filters if it comes from someone who isn't in my address book (whereas feedback reaches me by a different, spam-free route).

[Return to Summary]