Information About thealmightyguru.com
Quick Description
Page Editor: TED Notepad, but FrontPage 2003 for quick spell-checking Long DescriptionEvery once and awhile I get questions about my various Web pages. So I thought I'd give some "behind the scenes" information about my Web site and its inner workings. First, a little history. I started making Web pages in 1996 with my first Geocities account (before Yahoo! acquired them). I was so excited that I could finally have an online prescence and not have to be rich to afford it. I quickly learned that making a Web page was a daunting task that required a great deal of knowledge about computer skills that I didn't have at the time. I began making several rather dorky pages about my favorite video games. My skills, or lack of them, were quite obvious, even to myself. The pages were terrible, but they were on the Internet and that's all that mattered. My first pages were published using Netscape 4.5's Composer which I thought was great at the time, but in retrospect, I find it awful. All my first attempts were done half-heartedly because I couldn't do everything I wanted to do with the media of the time. Late in 2000, I decided to stop using Netscape's Composer and switch to hand coding all my pages in plain text using Microsoft's Notepad program, which I continued to use until I replace it with TED Notepad. However, I still use FrontPage for its spell check ability because I'm a rotten speller. Halfway through 2001 I was given a great gift. I asked my boss if he would let me run a Web page from our work server, I offered to pay for it, but he was generous enough to do it for free! So I was running a full Web server right from my work. When my site started getting more traffic than the test of my entire company in 2007, my boss pulled the plug on me, and I went to my current provider, Hostmonster. Since then my Web page has grown at a rather surprising rate. When I first started at Geocities I was limited to 10 MB of space which I didn't even fill. As of August, 2008 I'm a around 5.6 GB and growing. It impresses me to know I've spent this much work on it. Because I'm still rather dumb when it comes to writing Web databases, most of my site is still archived and updated by hand, which is obviously a tedious task. Every time I think about converting my site over to a database engine, I think about how much control I'll lose, and I decide against it. Although I try to keep my HTML habits up to date with the latest W3C standards, much of my old habits are still with me which means that a lot of my site won't render properly on browsers that don't support backward compatibility. I try to keep things up to date, but I think that a lot of the current W3C standards are awful, so a lot of it will just have to do without. When I started HTML, style-sheets were still in their infancy, so most of my development habits are old HTML style. I've been slowly learning and converting my HTML to use the new CSS formats, but it's an uphill battle for me because I don't care for how they are implemented. I've created thousands of graphics for my web page. Almost all of them were created in Corel Photo-Paint 7-13. I prefer Corel products over Adobe. Every day my site is visited by about 3,400 people. That translates to about 11,000 page loads, 100,000 file hits, and a total of 2.1 GB of data transfered. I learned Java and JavaScript from looking at source code examples on the Internet. It's certainly not the best way to learn, but it's definitely the cheapest. That's about it for now. |
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