My first experiences on the Internet were few and far between; before 1999, the only access I really had was at school (not really) and later at the local library when they set up a $10-per-hour Internet station. Around November 1999 my mother bought a new computer - a 500mhz P3 from Macrocom Computers, with a modem thingy to access Internets with. Macrocom were liquidated in 2001 and Orcon took over their shitty Internet service we used for a couple of months.
I had grasped the concept of using this Hypertext Markup stuff to create webpages some time around early 1999, and started experimenting with it at intermediate school, armed with an introductory book on HTML, whenever I was allowed near the crappy Macintosh in the corner of the room. (Neither my primary school nor the two intermediate schools I went to cared very much for technology.) I began creating my own webpages at home around December 1999 (near to age 12) which was hosted on Geocities, who provided FTP access and about 30mb of space at the time.
My first page was called "The lonely world of the little Baron of Hell". It was mundane and silly, but generally not bad work for a 12-year-old. The pages I created were for the most part just links to my weird and amateurish Doom modifications, dorky Visual Basic 3 programs and random MIDIs. I unfortunately lost all of my data, including my old web pages before planetScragadelic (my previous page) to a hard-drive failure in April 2004, and even though they were complete crap they still would have been worth putting up for historical purposes.
(While the aforementioned tumour-inducing Doom WADs and dorky VB3 programs disappeared into the ether, the random MIDIs still survive, and they can be found somewhere down the bottom of the music page.)
At some point (between 2001/2002) I got an E-mail from Yahoo! (who had annexed GeoCities less than a year before) stating they were soon diabling FTP support for free accounts. Not long after this, while mingling on IRC with the goons who formed the community of Doomworld.com, I chanced to find a rather altruistic Canadian by the name of Ryan Freeman, who ran his own dedicated webserver called Slipgate from an old PC running OpenBSD in the corner of his bedroom. Explaining my predicament, he agreed to adopt my site.
Being hosted on Slipgate meant I could rewrite my pages using PHP, which is a very awesome and manly web scripting language (I say manly because the code makes you feel small when you don't understand it, an aspect of programming I fear may disappear in the future.) PHP allowed me to separate the code for the layout and design of the pages from the content, as I'd only had static pages before. Having previously split my page into subsections, I retracted all my work into one site. This started with a strain of monolithic purple-coloured pages with different backgrounds, screenshots from the game Half-Life (the Xen maps in particular, of which had morbid but fascinating organic mixes of purple and green.) I began updating the main page with things that crossed my mind, and organised these updates in reverse chronological order (this process has become widely known as "blogging", a phenomenon in its own right - but I don't employ this term to refer to my page as I feel it carries negative connotations of prefabrication and irrelevance, and a writing style of this type).
A sample of the design of planetScragadelic, my previous site. Click for the full-size image.
After the purple monoliths came planetScragadelic, my previous site. The design of this was a sort of take-off of the old cliché design of the 'planet' series of gaming sites run by Gamespy. My design featured a caustic mix of black, orange, burgundy and yellow. While it was quite a decent design, it only survived three posts. In August 2003 I started working on a miniature content management system in PHP called Community Newsjournal. I neglected my own site, then sadly nothing came to fruition with the Newsjournal project as I lost all my data in the Great Hard-drive Headcrash of April 2004.
Having irrecoverably lost everything, I had to start from scratch with only the data left from Slipgate. I began redesigning the site with the title "The Antetheorem" using some of the old resources but spent far too many tired and lonely hours tweaking the malformed design before realising it just didn't fit together. The design had no concept or elegance, the colours were awful and incongruent ('the next site I make will be monochrome,' I thought), and moreover, I discovered the Web was shifting to a more streamlined page format called XHTML, which is designed to standardise all the page trickery that used to be done with faulty Javascript and HTML code hacks that would only work properly in one browser.
I came up with a design concept: a morbid, dirt-like texture melting into a clean-lined page body. The texture would creep in from the top and the bottom, so it sort of looked like the page was showing signs of rotting. (In case you're wondering, the texture at the top and bottom of this page is a close-up of my fence.) I also had a design idea that would absolutely require the use of Cascading Style Sheets: a site menu on the left that receded into the page, and let the main content text wrap under it.
This site is written with standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. (Well, actually I set it out using tables with old-school non-conformant HTML code first, then rewrote it. If you don't understand this paragraph, don't lose sleep over it.) Unfortunately under current CSS standards there are a number of restrictions with regards to setting out this site with the menu on the left.
- I won't say that it is impossible - since web standards are supposed to make everything possible - but I haven't yet found a way to implement my design without 'abusing' the CSS overflow property; this little artifact is designed to dictate what happens to page elements when the content inside them requires more space than the element provides; as a side-effect it starts a new 'flow' in the page, separate from the regular flow of text. Using this with my headers allows them to sit next to the menu (which is a left-float) while occupying all the space between the menu and the right margin.
- Overflow is also required for lists in order to allow them to indent. Due to overflow taking elements out of normal flow, the text in lists will not wrap around elements set with float: right;, so a large list with a small picture beside it might result in a large ugly gap. In fact, overflow is required to allow any element to be indented, since floating elements seem to deny the padding, margin and border properties of any elements next to them. I couldn't get the paragraphs to indent from the left edge of the titles while next to the menu for this reason.
- Another problem with the left-floated menu is that it makes table elements unviable. A table element set to 100% width refuses to coexist with the menu. What the CSS standard really needs is something like a float-clearance property, so from a particular offset a left-floated element could be respected by all the other elements in the normal page flow just as a normal left edge. Then all my problems would be solved.
All code on this site was written with an ASCII text editor (yes, Notepad). Images are edited in Paintbrush or Photoshop. All images and files (save for the pages and stylesheet) are kept in one folder. I didn't design this site to be compatible with Internet Explorer (ie. I haven't added any extra code to work around its problems.) In choosing between being compatible with Internet Explorer or being compatible with open web standards, the latter is most logical. If you don't agree, you are wrong.
To date I have no formal education in web design.
