Site FAQ

I did, from scratch. Pure HTML and CSS with a few lines of JavaScript on the client side, and PHP with MySQL on the server side, and that's it. I use no frameworks, no libraries, no extenal scripts, no external CSS, no font files, no cookies—and no AI. Everything is extremely simple. None of the garbage that bloats almost every site on he web these days…junk that is often pressed into service as a poor sbstitute for competent programming these days.

This site is simple, but how fancy does a web site have to be? The page you are readng is literally a hundred times smaller than the average web page on the Internet these days—and most of what is downloaded is images. 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 for more typical sites.

None of the above. As I’ve said, I’ve written this site from scratch, with a text editor. I don’t need three million lines of framework code. I don’t call any libraries. I don’t need any “APIs.” I don’t require a megabyte of CSS. I don’t load fifty external JavaScript modules. I don’t load anything from other sites.

None. AI doesn’t come within a million miles of my site. AI is for idiots and copyright infringers, and I am neither.

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.

I created all the images used on my site. 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.

Since 1997 (29 years!), my site has received 24,258,695 visitors. Currently it is receiving an average of about 1,238 unique daily visitors—but I don’t know how many of those are human. Most of the human traffic seems to be on weekends.