A number of people have asked me about this site and my plans for it. Instead of sending the information out via many, many emails, I have decided to post it here.
About This Site
This site started out a few years ago as a way for me to experiment with HTML. In fact, originally it wasn't even destined for the Net, as I had no Internet access. As you can see though, I got over that fast.
Originally, the site contained a rather small amount of information. It was basically a little about me, made mention of some of my projects, and had a bland white and black colour scheme. Of course, some of you say that my current colour scheme is not much better! Anyway, the most often used part of the page, the circuits, was actually added as an afterthought. It was added basically because I had nothing better to do one day. Little was I to know what it would turn into! The page first went online 4 years ago and has been busy ever since.
Soon after the page went up, I began receiving emails about, well, almost everything. The most common topic was electronics. I was getting circuit requests, suggestions and other things to include on the page. So, I had to update. The site structure stayed the same for a year or so, before it outgrew itself. At that time, the whole thing was reorganized and moved to it's current location, at ExecuLink.
About a year ago, the Spudgun section was added. At that time, the circuits page(s) was about the only electronics info on the whole site. I changed that last update, when I got together some info and put in a whole section dedicated to electronics. Since then, that section has been steadily expanding. Right now, the circuits seem to be what is attracting the most visitors to my site. That is bound to shift when I expand the electronics section even further.
A lot of people ask me what tools I use to produce this site. Basically, I use a souped up text editor to do all the coding. It is called NoteTab Pro, and is the Word of text editors. It supports limited scripting, templates, spell checking and much more. It is a great replacement for Windows NotePad. You can download a freeware version at www.notetab.com. As for graphics, I use a combination of PhotoStyler and Paint Shop Pro. The hardware varies quite a bit. Most of the older pages were made on a 486DX/33. The newer stuff is actually made mostly on an old Tandy XT laptop, using MS-DOS editor. A Cyrix 6x86 166+ is used to preview, proof-read and upload the HTML. Of course, it is also used for graphics, as the Tandy laptop would be almost useless for that. Lately, I have been using a HP 660LX Windows CE Palmtop for both coding and graphics. This lets me complete changes much faster, as I am no longer bound to a desk or large, clunky laptop. I also use this machine for answering email.
A few have asked me about hosting. My site is hosted on a small server in my basement. It is simply a 486 DX2/66 running Wndows NT Server and Internet Information Server 4. It handles all my Internet traffic, plus proxying, mail, FTP and file serving duties on my internal network.
As for future plans, I'm not plannng anything too radical at the moment. I will continue to update the site, and try to use any worthwhile new technologies that come out.