Credit where Credit is due

There are a lot of things I'd like to share on this page, and I think I'll start with the philosophy behind my web-publishing...

--- DESIGN PHILOSOPHY ---

Content:

Some people call pages like this "Vanity Pages". I don't disagree in the slightest. The whole concept of a page all about me could without much of a stretch be called narcissistic. But although I might be vain, I assure you that the page isn't entirely in vain, at least not to my needs. Because of my hobbies, I frequently meet people both on the internet, and through my hobbies, who want to know more about something I do. The internet is a fantastic tool for me in that respect. I can post my art, and ask people who are more accomplished than I, to visit the site and leave me criticism and advice. I can post my writing (like the in-character party journal for a roleplaying game I'm currently playing in) and invite the other players in the game to read up and hopefully inspire their playing, and bring some good memories of the game. And then comes the work I occasionally do for friends, in terms of artwork or pictures for the internet, mainly used by the people I know from internet chat at "ICS Hallway". This page, obviously comes in very useful when someone wants to find out more about a particular hobby of mine.

 

I suppose what I mean to say is that Yes, it's vain to have this sort of a page, but I'm sure it's a little less vain than carrying copies of all of my work everywhere I go. Instead, if someone wants to find out more about my brewing (okay, bad example, I don't have a brewing page up yet) or my calligraphy and illumination, or my roleplaying or anything else, I just send them here. For this, of course, I do not apologize.

Format:

I feel very passionately about the WWW. Specifically, I feel very strongly that the web was meant to be a place where information could be obtained by everyone, regardless of the maker of their computer or their software. It was supposed to be a place where a search for information could begin, where a portion of the power of all the computers on it and all the data they offered, were available to you. I think that due to capitalism and short-sighted impatient people who lacked any breadth of thought, or reasonable consideration, it has become yet another stomping ground for the technologically biased and sadly, intolerant. Because of this, I try my hardest to keep my pages open to what I view as the lowest-common-denominator. Toward that end, I have created a small company, Leonardo's Dream Creative Works, dedicated to publishing pages that are useful and accessible to everyone, even those who by choice or need, use browsers which do not support the "newest" and the "best" technology available to the web-authoring-world

 

Where an effect can be used to enhance my website, aesthetically or usefully, I will try to incorportate it. However, I must be able to use it so that others can work around the effect, or it will not be used at all. For example, I try hard to make sure that all of my frames pages use the <noframes> tag to provide content to browsers which can't handle frames. Further, I plan it so that the main content pages have all the links needed to traverse the site, if the sidebar frame is not available to my audience. I think that with planning and a little creative work, a webpage can be attractive and useful both. If you have any comments, either on my opinions here, or about how I've designed or implemented these pages, I would welcome you to tell me about them.

--- ACTUAL CREDITS ---

Graphics Tools

My absolutely favourite graphics tool is Paint Shop Pro from Jasc software ( http://www.jasc.com ). This software is affordable, and feature-rich. It can use Photoshop plug-ins too, though I've only tried one or two. All the graphics on this website have been touched at some point by Paint Shop Pro version 5.

 

Webpage Authoring Tools

I'm toying with Microsoft's FrontPage 97. I have no special love for this company, nor any vendetta against them. I personally don't feel their marketing department behaves ethically, but I would also like to see the multitude of other similarly-guilty companies taken down rather than singling one out on the basis of its success. But back to the product, it does some things I find very useful, like dynamic "Include" of text and/or formatting, decent "delta-" publishing, and forward- and backward-link maintenance. If I could find a similar tool which did all of the same well (I have some problems with how FP97 handles "delta-" updates), and maybe even a few other key features like automatically updating the revised date of a page targetted by a hyperlink, then I might very well move on and never look back at FP97. In the defense of the software, I haven't used even a fraction of the potential of this software, and I mean to investigate the software in the coming months. The one thing I know I don't like, however, is the inability of a user to employ FTP *and* FrontPage to update the same website. Attempting to use an FTP client can cause fatal errors with FrontPage the next time it is used to publish the web..

 

Regardless of how I feel about FP97, I don't agree with how it codes some HTML effects. To ensure my pages look the way I want them to look, and to ensure reverse-compatibility, I use a text editor. My personal favourite is "EditPad", due to several fantastic features like tabs to manage multiple files.

Publishing Tools

FP97 does a good job of transferring a whole site onto the internet, so for the time being this is how I upload my content. When I'm not able to use FP97 (for example, while working on other sites, or when uploading CGI scripts), I use WS-FTP. This feature rich graphical FTP client does everything I need. The only complaint I have is regarding how the file transfer dialog keeps popping up and grabbing focus, preventing me from doing any meaningful work while transferring many small files in the background.

 

When I need a terminal session on another machine, I use TeraTerm. It handles telnet very well.

Email

I use Eudora Light. I'm considering looking into Eudora Pro, since I recently have the need to send and receive messages to and from two different POP accounts.

 

Other Tools

 

Page Maintained by Peter Westergaard, peterw@mindless.com (or peter@leodream.com )
This page is a production of Leonardo's Dream Creative Works ( http://www.leodream.com )
Copyright © 1998 Peter Westergaard. All rights reserved.

Last Revised: June 27, 1999