Web Site
Building
PIM Project
Treo Phone
Nokia N800
Asus eeePC
Adventures in Linux
My Beginnings
On October 7, 1997 I finally got through the sign-up
maze at Geocities to get my free home page space. Using the
provided HTML editor provided online proved cumbersome, so I
began downloading the source of my pages and editing in
Notepad. Next I tried the Internet Assistant add in for
Word 95. That was pretty nice. I could type and
format pretty much like I was in a word processor that I was used
to, and the code would be written. It has the ability to
switch to an "HTML source" view for some of the finer
points of formatting.
Search for an HTML Editor
Actually, it is a search for an HTML editor and web site
management tool. The new packages are geared toward doing much
more than typing up individual web pages. They have features to
keep track of the structure of all the pages on a site, check
links, and handle all the publishing tasks, which is the job of
getting the files from the computer's hard disk up to the file
server.
HotDog Pro 4.03
I downloaded a trial version of this program from the website
at Sausage Software. There is no WYSIWYG editing with this
program. All the text and HTML codes are entered on a screen that
looks like a word processor. There are a good assortment of tool
bars, which you can turn on and off through Toolbars under the
View menu.
I have gotten at least one computer crash with this program.
It was listed as an "Exception EAccess Violation in module
HOTDOG.EXE". I don't believe that there was any actual loss
of any data with that crash.
There have been a couple of other glitches such as the scroll
bar and arrows for the editing screen getting stuck on so that
the document would scroll when I just held the mouse cursor over
the arrow button without even clicking anything. That actually
just happened as I am typing this on 11/29/97. I just closed the
file and re-opened it. The scroll bars are working fine now.
Just had another crash. The program uses the spell checker from
my Microsoft Word 95 (7.0), and that's fine with me. The trouble
is that I just had a lock up while doing it. I think I'll give up
on using this program until I get the new version on Monday.
In fairness to HotDog, their support people sent me the
following message:
". 4.5 full release is going to be out on Monday, and that
adds a LOT of functionality to it. I suggest that you check it
out if you really want to see what HotDog is about.
I hope this helps! Feel free to contact us again if you have any
further inquiries."
These are nice people with a very interesting product. You can
bet I'll be downloading the version 4.5 to give a trial on
Monday...
Office Assistant Add-in for Word 95
This was the approach I used to create most of the first
updates of the early pages. I downloaded this Word Add-in from
the Microsoft site, and it made a pretty good almost WYSIWYG
editor. I haven't checked yet to see if I have the same feature
installed with Word 97.
5/7/98 The HTML feature wasn't in my installation of Word 97,
so I re-ran the Office installation program and included it. I am
back to using Word as my HTML editor.
FrontPage 98
I downloaded a trial beta version of this program from
Microsoft's web site. The thing I like most about this program is
the ability to edit and enter text right on a screen that pretty
much shows how the page will appear.
This program appears to use some HTML codes I'm not familiar
with and it uses some of the ones that I am used to in ways I
haven't seen before. For instance, to center something, I'm used
to putting a tag in front of the material to be centered and then
a close-center tag at the end. FrontPage 98 uses a format that
says "align=center... with no end mark. Another thing I
found odd about this program is that it uses a closing code for
the "paragraph" code.
I'm not sure if these things are the newest standards of HTML,
or if Microsoft just does things differently. I would think there
would be a preferences menu to change some of these things, but I
haven't found it yet.
This program appears to have great promise for total web site
management. It supports changing the link addresses in local
files as they are dragged to a different directory in the
structure of the web site on the local hard disk.
I also had at least one system crash while this program as
well Additionally, this program takes up a whole lot of disk
space.
Front Page Express
2/7/98 This one just sort of appeared on my new computer. I
guess it came as a part of the Office, Small Business Edition
that Gateway included on the new computer. I'm updating this page
with it now.
Geocities
"Interstitial Ads" and
"GeoPops"
On Friday, November 21, 1997 Geocities began an
experiment. Occasionally, when one tries to load a member's page into a browser,
an ad page for Geocities pops up for 10 seconds instead. If you have the correct
browser technology installed, the page you wanted will load after 10
seconds.
5/7/98 It looks like I may need to go back to advertising the
Geocities address as the address of the index page of my website.
When I move to the CyberRanch, Easy.com, my current ISP will be a
long distance call. I can always link from Geocities to the
actual pages on my new ISP, as I am doing with my Easy.com site
now. I only wish that Geocities would let us use an
"images" subdirectory on their free site. They do offer
this feature if you pay them. The links in all my pages are set
to use images from a subdirectory.
Arachnaphilia
NVU
PageBreeze
PIM Project
Treo Phone
Nokia N800
Asus eeePC
Adventures in Linux
Back to Main
Computer Page
created 2/7/08
updated 2/7/08