It's All Mine!!!

This page was design with notepad (that's right the one in windows 3.11) with the aide of the help file in HTMLed Pro. I started making my first page with HTMLed Pro v2.5 and the realized two things: (1) If I really wnated to learn HTML I would need repetitive practice typing all those tags myslef. And (2) once the shareware license ran out on my unregistered copy of HTMLed Pro I would be on my own anyway! But the help files still worked and boy did I use them. They are pretty thurough. One of these days when I strike it rich I think I will have to register HTMLed Pro, it was such a good program while it lasted. And for all those of you that use WYSIWYG HTML generators, I'd like to let you in on a little secret... What You See Is Not What I Get!

This site also has a few other nice features. Since frames really agrevate me and most of the people I know, I don't use them. I also break the legacy of frames coming into my page. So if ever you get caught in someones frames you can come to my homepage to break free. Since I don't know if you've been good or bad I'm not going to give you any cookies either. Maybe if I knew you better, and maybe if you knew me better you might trust or want some of my cookies, but until the this site will be cookie free. And while we're on the subject of trust let's talk about security and the lack there of with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript enabled right now I can very easily intercept everything you send and recieve from your computer... even when you leave this site to say go do your banking on-line. And whats worse I can intercept all your certificates and the decryption keys. What I'm trying to say is JavaScript isn't very safe... at all! Java on the other hand is much more secure but pretty useless on a personal site except to do neat web tricks that get old before they have finished loading and compiling. So with that I say this site is also Java free!!

Before I get too far I'd like to clarify a few things:

1. A home page is the page that automatically loads when you start your web browser. If one is smart about it the page actually resides on your own machine, that way you don't have to wait on server conections as you move through your website (provided you used relative URLs).
2. A web page is any page on the internet (you know something that ends in .html). Any homepage on the internet is a web page, but a web page is only a homepage if your browser loads it on start up.
3. A front page is the prefered entry point to your web site. It will usually have the name index.html or whatever your web server requiers. Often front pages are homepages, but once again this is only true if it's the first thing loaded.
4. A web site is the collection of web pages (home page too, if applicable) that are on a server (site). It's not the server itself. You are now on my site even though this is not my server.

I say all of this because I don't want anyone getting upset at how I have things set up here. My homepage, by definition, is what I go to when my browser starts. It provides me with just about everything I could want to go to in one (1) click! This concept is from the days of when bookmarks weren't readily available. You simply made a web page of your own bookmarks and called it your homepage so your browser would start there. Then you didn't have to do so much searching to get where you wanted to go. Don't get me wrong, bookmarks, hotlist, favorites, or whatever your browser calls them are great. But a homepage offers more. You can put a description with your links or maybe a graphic like an icon or button of some sort. You can personalize it. And if it's good enough and has enough to offer maybe someone else will put a link to it in their homepage or bookmarks.

And with this comes the idea of others looking at your homepage. Most companies design their sites for the benifit of customers. But personal pages can be set up for one person, a group a friends, or for the masses. I have tried to find a happy medium. Something that has a good set of links (for me and everyone else) as well as enough content on it's own. And because it's mine I can let people know a little bit about me what what I like and all that sort of thing. I would like to think that my site offers enough content that other people that come accross it will like it's convienient layout and what it has to offer in the way of quick and distinct paths to many different areas of the web. Enough so that they will bookmark it or put it on there own page and tell people about my site. It's nice to know that other people like the things we create. But on the other hand I also want a site that is easy for me to navigate an contains all the rich elements I desire. What I mean by that is the graphic content. I like big, pretty pictues to help illustrate where I am about to go on the web. But I realize that the big pretty pictures are a burden to others that don't have this hard drive in there computer. So what I have done is left one small area of slightly higher graphic content and called it My Stuff. Not because I don't want you looking at it (I wouldn't have posted it if that were the case), but merely to indicate that in this area your concers for speed are not shared by me. If you must go there... suffer. Actually everything that's in My Stuff is located elsewhere on the site, but for my convinience I put my version right there all together at the top, sorry, I'm selfish that way.

With that in mind realize that this site is my home site. It resides completely on my machine as well as on the server you are pulling it from. For me all the pages load in the blink of an eye, no matter how big the graphics. This is of course because it's pulling the data of my own hard drive. The key to this is, as I mentioned above, to use relative URLs. That simply means that when you make an anchor (hyperlink), instead of putting the whole path, you just tell it where to go relative to where you are now. An example would be a link to the Who I is page. If the anchor was like this: http://members.xoom.com/acklen/quincy.html then even from my computer I would have to go to that server to view the page. And to view it on my own computer I would have to use seperate anchors like: file://localhost/C:/internet/XOOM/quincy.html but then if I posted that page your browser would look for the file quincy.html in your computers c:\internet\XOOM directory. as if you even have one! But fear not with the use of relative URLs since my computer know that it's already in the c:\internet\XOOM directory and since you computer knows that it's already on http://members.xoom.com in the /acklen directory... all you do is tell it what file to look for, form where it already is. In this case you are looking at the mine.html page and you want to look at the quincy.html page Since there is no change of directories all you do is type the new file name for the anchor: quincy.html and it's so much shorter too. If I wanted to link to a graphic (quincy.jpg) in say the graphics directory (members.xoom.com/acklen/graphics/) then all you do is add the directory to the URL: graphics/quincy.html it's that easy.