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That's his power? He's mysterious?"
"Well, *terribly* mysterious."
This is the section of the site where you find those responsible. Well, that's just me really. As you may have gathered from the front page, this site was written to explain Airsoft. From there it just sort of got bigger, eventually getting its own domain and hosting on 4th October 2001 to keep it separate from my personal website. The reason for this was twofold, primarily to keep the two lives distinct from each other, as some of the stuff I get up to wouldn't fit well with my Airsoft chums. ;) Secondly, it was to preempt any problems due to bandwidth issues, as I was hosting it on my free homepage with Demon. It's not yet hit any storage limitations, but data transfer tends to be more of an issue.
I was actually quite surprised by how many people visit this site, I guess I hadn't really thought much about it until I saw the stats, but apparantly there are about 150 of you visiting a day!.
This site was constructed using Dreamweaver, but I only actually tend to use it in much the same way as I would notepad. This is because I find it a lot easier to see how things work when you're coding it yourself and also due to the increasing complexity of Dreamweaver. Occasionally I use Dreamweaver features like inserting images (because it fills in the image size settings for me) but generally it's all Hand-Hacked-HTML. This explains why there aren't any really flash features, because I don't know how to do them. That said, I was pretty pleased with the switching between tabs effect on the notepad, as you have to change 2 frames with one click. Took me ages to do that one. I also spent some time a while back converting it to use Cascading Style Sheets, which is also a pig. The main problem I have its leaving it 18 months between updates and forgetting how to do it all...
Graphics were all done in Adobe Photoshop, which again I don't really know how to use properly, but I'm slowly getting the idea of layers, etc. All the graphics on the site (with the exception of the blue_rock background, and the photos I've borrowed) were done by me, either by cropping them from photos (big thanks to Boglin for the loan of a digital camera) or just constructed by hand.
Space wise, it takes up less than 10mb, which isn't too bad really given the high number of images present. The largest one of those is 151kb, but 90% of them are below 30kb. The quotes are all from various films or songs, because they have a habit of sticking in my mind like that. I'm rather pleased at how appropriate most of them are actually. This site is tested by me using Explorer, which, as the stats show, is the most popular (in terms of numbers) browser out there. I personally use Firefox and find it annoying that the site doesn't look as good with it. This is noticeable on the links page, which look hugely spaced out in Firefox but dead on in IE. Firefox also doesn't support downloadable fonts so things like the page titles and the button text look normal instead of as they should.
Sometimes the proof reading doesn't catch everything, as Dreamweaver has a nasty habit of setting some of the images to point to local files. Naturally I don't see that when I test it, as I do have the relevant files. Fortunately I have a crack team of people to point out all my errors at the first opportunity. Sometimes they even point out the errors on the site...
I think that pretty much covers the website development, so it must be time for a random little profile on me. :)
Name: Hatchet Age: Old enough to know better Occupation: Professional disturber of the peace Likes: Pyrotechnics, Goths, Martial Arts, Motorbikes Dislikes: People who ask me questions I've already answered here ;) Location: London, Birmingham, Scotland, Whitby... |
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