The history tells you how this site came to life and started to grow - not in one day, but rather over the last year and a half plus. It's telling its story in a chronological way. It doesn't tell about the tools and programmes I used or still use - thats where this page comes in.

Making a home page is a lonely and time consuming process.

Lonely because you sit there alone in front of your computer -
and time consuming because you try and try and try again until
things start to look the way you want them to look.

And then, it's never completed; there's always something
that you could do better; always the weird typo you only notice
when your FTP upload is done; always the phrase that says
not quite what you meant to say; always the graphics you could have done more carefully.

 

It all started back in 1999 when I was reading an article in a German computer magazine about building of home pages, tools and programmes to use and providers that offer free web space. That got me interested and I wanted to have a go at a web site of my own. I did not want to spend an awful lot of money, I just wanted to have a try. So I looked for things that were preferrably free to be had. The article - it was rather a a feature series theay ran - also gave some basics on HTML and it all looked quite simple and straightforward. So I started right away.

The first try I had did - not surprisingly - not satisfy and I had to re-work a lot. I did not start again from scratch, though, I just gradually arrived at the design I'm still using. I don't have the first version of my page any longer, but I don't feel sad about that, it did not really mean much. And of course, I made all the mistakes, fell in most of the traps a novice is prone to fall in, like the old uppercase/lowercase problem of file names that your local Windows installation glosses over, but your web server won't, file type mismatches when uploading via FTP and of course ye olde, not closed HTML tag that did in those days show up only in Netscape, but not in Internet Explorer (Opera, Firefox and Google Chrome were not yet alive in those days).

One of the first pieces of sofware I started to use ist Uli Meybohms Phase 5 HTML Editor that I found both simple to use and reliable. I'm still using it occasionally for certain things. It's a code editor, made to write things in plain HTML code, which again means that you first have to acquire a certain knowledge of HTML structure and tags. (I have to come clean and confess that I sometimes start to write things using Edit Pad Pro, an even more basic editor.) - Well, since I've started using Joomla! all this is no longer as important as it used to be. Nice though, to have a simple code editor handy.

For graphics, I'm using a whole bunch of programmes, but mostly Photoshop. There's a whole bunch of other programmes, of course.

When it comes to browsers, well like many people I'm using Firefox (no need for a link here, I guess), but I also use Chrome and others to check how my pages look in other browsers (there was a time when browsers used a plethora of render engines, and it was really important to check and check).

As for my hardware, well I'm using a des ktop machine, I also have a laptop for when I'm travelling.

Congratulations if you've managed to read on so far :-) A long text with only one image to soften it up. Well, after time I redid the whole page using a CMS called Joomla. It got rather tiresome to work in vanilla HTML and there it stops.