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About the Building of This Website |
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I started working with desktop computers in 1996, a relative latecomer. Early on, things were done on a shoestring budget. My first desktop, a 486, ran at a blistering 66MHz. It was cobbled together from various older parts, and ran Windows 95. In particular, my older monitor was only capable of displaying a 640 x 480 screen. This had a profound influence on how this web page took shape when I started building it around 1999. As I began to discover all the interesting things on the internet, I started running across web pages that were forcing viewers to display in wider screen formats than my humble setup was capable of. This forced me to deal with those hateful left-right scroll bars. I especially disliked the occasional website that didn't even bother to use any sort of CR (carriage return) in their formatting. Each paragraph was like one huge, run-on sentence. This definitely irritated me- considerably! So by the time I got around to creating my own site, I had resolved that it would be more friendly to those like myself who were still using the earlier, more limited display hardware. Sometimes one can still see these super-long lines today by doing a "View Source" command to inspect the code that created a particular web page. I picked up a copy of "HTML 4 For the World Wide Web" by Elizabeth Castro (Berkeley, CA, Peachpit Press, 1998) and quickly learned some formatting tricks. Chief among these was the use of Tables, how to embed (surround) pictures with text, and most important, how to force the viewer's display to render my site in a 605 pixel fixed width format. The exact reason for 605px vs, say, 640px is lost in the mists of time now, but I'm sure it had something to do with the peculiarities and limitations of my particular 'obsolete' monitor. What you see today is the result- a rather odd looking, narrow rendition of a website. It stands as a protest to all those 'wide- formatted' websites that so irritated me in '96-'99. HTML 4 is now an obsolete form and is 'deprecated', but it still works... I take pride in having learned HTML well enough to hand craft my site. No editors or website building software of any kind were used. I created it line by line, endless edit by edit, until it looked good in my little 640 x 480 monitor. I'm gratified that a few sections of my site, such as the material on Bobtail Antennas and Flag and Pennant Antennas have been widely read- and bookmarked! I'm also amazed that Angelfire still exists, having survived the 'dot com blowup' of the early 2000's. They offered a free website back then, and still do today. Hats off to them for giving the K3YGU/K3KY website such a stable platform all these years. I'm grateful... I moved on to Windows 98SE around 1999, and resolutely continued using it as version after version of Windows came along- all the way up to 2007, when I had finally had it with Microsoft. I learned how to use Linux OS's, mainly debian based distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint, and I haven't looked back. I definitely DO NOT miss all the drama of constant patches and security software maintenance! All those hours of maintenance were eating all my available time- I had multiple computers, even back then. Linux, by contrast, is an easier, lower maintenance environment for the casual desktop user like myself. Love it! As I view this page today on a 1600 x 900 monitor, it fills about 38 percent of the screen on the left. I find it very readable, like a book. Remember those? There are good reasons why books are tall and rectangular, not twice as wide as they are tall. Even today, with no scrollbars, I find those 'super-wide' pages objectionable. They are just a lot less easy to read. A book I just looked at has about 70 characters per line. Emails often force a line feed at ~70 to 80 characters wide. There is good reason for this, and it was all worked out centuries before computers ever appeared on the scene. K3KY, August 2020 |
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