My Site

I did, from scratch, with a text editor.

None. Nothing on the client side, nothing on theserver side. Pure HTML and CSSwith a few lines of JavaScript on theclient side, and straight PHP with MySQL onthe server side, and that's it. I use no frameworks, no“libraries,” no extenal scripts, no externalCSS, no “APIs,” no font files, no cookies—andno AI. Everything is extremely simple.None of the garbage that bloats almost everysite on the web these days.

So what? It’s content that counts—right? The page you are readng is literally a hundred times smaller than the average web page on the Internet these days. My site doesn’t even require JavaScript (although a few parts, such as the photo galleries, will use it if it’s enabled).

Most web sites are around 4 MB in size and may load two hundred files per page. Mine is about 0.2 MB in size and typically loads four or five files. Load time for my site is about 300 ms, compared to around 19,000 ms for more typical sites.

Why should I? AI doesn’t come within a million miles of my site. AI is for idiots and copyright infringers, and I am neither.

Why us artificial intelligence when real intelligence is available?

None. At one time I was downloading custom fonts, initially from Google, until it dawnd on me that Google was using this to track visitors to my site. So I moved the fonts to my server and downloaded them from there. But I finally decided that custom fonts weren’t really that useful, so all custom fonts are disabled right now (look at the page source code and see for yourself).

I use very little JavaScript, and I wrote it myself, and I certainly do not load any third- party JS from external sites. Who knows what might be hidden in that external JS code?

I created all the images used on my site, too. Even most of the icons (such as the plus and minus icons you see next to these questions) are my own work, created in Adobe Ilustrator and incorporated as SVG elements.

I use a text editor (an old copy of UltraEdit ) to write the code, and SecureCRT to SSH into the server. I use SecureFX for movinng data files. That’s it.

By the way, I can reommend all three of these products wthout reservation, they are all excellent. SecureCRT and SecureFX, in particular, are second to none, and are among the most reliable and bug-free producs I’ve ever used.

I’m still renovating the site, so sections that I’d like to eventually rebuild are grayed out for now. The Reviews section is about the only part still waiting for renovation, but I will probably add more content thereafter.

Since 1997 (29 years!), my site has received 24,525,955 visitors. Currently it is receiving an average of about 3,268 unique daily visitors—but probably less than one percent of them are human (the rest are bots, scanners, spiders, scrapers, crawlers, etc.).

Generally speaking, no. Out of several hundred photos in the galleries, I can think of only four cases of retouching (other than contrast, saturation etc.):

Two of the oldest photos I have of Notre-Dame showing the balcony between the towers, were retouched to remove the huge, ugly steel net covering the balcony. I combined multiple exposures from slightly different angles to remove the net and restore what was hidden behind it.

In another photo I removed a plastic bottle that ruined the shot.

And in one other photo there is a woman with one foot exposed, and her feet were really ugly and distracting, so I removed them.