Web site details

Design philosophy

The pages of this site are completely without frames or tables, and extremely minimal scripting. They are designed to be compatible with as many systems as possible and load as quickly as possible. At the same time they're hopefully not too boring and get across the necessary content. Perfunctory is the bottom line.

In the best traditions of the Internet, this site is being worked on horribly unpredictably — usually late at night — with no logical pattern to when it is updated or changed.

Technologies (or lack of)

This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a web page layout technology which is not well supported by very old browser software. If your browser doesn't 'like' them everything will still work; it just won't look as pretty.

HTML, links (all 3,165 of them as of September 2005), and CSS at this site are checked and validated frequently using the online tools provided by the Web Design Group.

As explained on the viewing notes page, colour profiles are embedded in the full-size images on the site, in an attempt to maintain tonal accuracy across diverse systems.

Tools

This site was coded and designed by myself, initially on a very elderly Macintosh Performa, these days on an early iMac; one of the big bubbly ones.

I currently use the exceptionally cool text editor SubEthaEdit for the HTML stuff. It has a very handy live preview which gives you half a clue as to what's going on.

Currently the site is sort of auto-generated, up to a point. The difficulty with this is that I wanted it to be something I wrote myself, and something which you ran once, which produced static pages which I could then upload. It works reasonably well, but there is still a lot of work to do on it, as with every other thing I start working on...

Web hosting and e-mail facilities provided by those nice people at Netscalibur (formerly Direct Connection).

Internet access provided by NTL World.