About this site

There's no intent here for anyone to ever sit down and read all of this site. It's meant to be consulted as a reference. As relevant issues come up, you can come here and see what, if anything, I have to say on the subject, and then do as you think best.

This site works more or less the way I wish the whole Web worked. (Try squeezing your browser window to odd shapes while viewing any page in the site.) Its pages should load pretty fast even on dialup, it's easy to read on your screen, and the navigation is, I hope, simple and intuitive. Once I post a page about a subject, its Internet URL never changes, or hardly ever.

I'm especially interested in Web design for intranets inside companies. I think this is a critical neglected means of coordination within organizations, especially in for-profit companies, and I think most companies are doing it wrong, or not trying, or not even aware of the opportunity. For more, see my page on managing information overload.

I also want to remind people about the roots of the Web, the way it was supposed to work in the beginning. Way too many sites are hard-coded so they require horizontal scrolling if your browser window is less than 1024 pixels wide at the moment. Some even arrogantly set your browser window to full-screen when you load their home page. All my pages are set up to fluidly re-wrap, anytime you feel like re-sizing your browser window.

Web designers now also seem to ignore the role of whitespace, which is universally understood by designers of printed books as crucial for readability. Whitespace is space on the page with nothing printed on it, in margins, and between paragraphs, sidebars, pictures, and other elements. If you cram the pages of a book absolutely full of text and things, edge to edge, as in a dictionary, it makes people feel like reading it is hard work. A judicious amount of whitespace is reassuring to readers, and makes the content more friendly and accessible. On many Web pages these days there's almost no whitespace, and sometimes it's a challenge to even find the primary content you came for.

In hyperlinks to other Websites, I try to respect the site author's choice of page title as my link text whenever possible. When I am short of space, sometimes I paraphrase, without, I hope, changing the sense of the title. This definitely includes wordy titles of Microsoft Knowledge Base articles, many of which are pretty darn wordy.

Sidebars, navigation

People willing to discuss business over breakfast may have other unsavory habits.

... that's what I call a sidebar. On this site, sidebars are extra content you can skip without missing any main points. Some will be full-width like any other paragraph, some will be "floated" to the margin with the main text wrapped around. Floated sidebars and regular ones inside topics typically give extra information about content close to them.*

Text formatted like this with a light yellow background is a warning of some sort.

This is a style I named direwarning. If you see one of these (not too often) best read it.

This is a style called emphasisbox, used for something that's not in the nature of a warning, but does need emphasis.

I'd like to think everything else here is self-explanatory. There are only four navigation elements:

I don't know if anybody else gets this, but I think of the dashed-line border of the page menu as a reference to the rest of the page it's on, symbolizing the correspondence between the menu and the page.

Section menus, which link to other pages within a section, are formatted as HTML definition or bullet lists with no borders. Some pages with section menus have a little content relating to the subject matter of the whole section.

Page menus, which jump down to subheads on the same page, are HTML number lists with a dashed border, usually floated to the right margin with the start of the page content wrapped around them, as on this page.

I used to always document acronyms by following them with the full text in parentheses. Now I often use <ACRONYM> tags instead, with a title attribute and a CSS dotted blue underline, as seen in this sentence. If you hover the labeled acronym text with your mouse pointer, explanatory title text will appear. Yahoo and others use dashed or dotted blue underlines like this for different things, but I think it's at least clear to users that something other than ordinary hyperlink behavior is to be expected.

* When I use this same sidebar formatting down at the bottom of a topic, like this, with or without asterisks or footnote numbers in the text, that content is even more ancillary and skip-able than the sidebars appearing with the main text flow.

Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network. (Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996)

"Any browser" homepage button

I've had this button in the footer of my home page since 1997. For years (for lack of a better idea) it linked to browser download pages: first Netscape, then Opera, and then Firefox.

Now it links to the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign, which advocates that Web pages published on the global open Internet should be functional in any browser a user is likely to use, rather than coded for any particular browser. This is one of the original design goals of the Web going back to its beginning at CERN. The campaign site gives relevant guidance on HTML coding, most of which is stuff I've been recommending for years.

I'd go a bit farther than the Berners-Lee pull quote now: putting "best viewed with" language on a Web page, anytime since about 2000, amounts to an admission of incompetence.

This site should be functional in all the most-used browsers, meaning Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera, in my idea of priority order. When there's a conflict between the results of CSS formats in Internet Explorer and the results in the other more standards-compliant browsers, which happens fairly often, I'm willing to settle for optimum results in the other browsers, especially Firefox, and functional, not-too-ugly results in IE.

I know Apple Safari has a bigger usage share than Google Chrome. I put Chrome ahead of Safari because they use the same WebKit layout engine, which means I don't need to test in both, and I'd rather look at Chrome than Safari.

Development history

Date	Comments
5/96	First version had the Internet clients table and PC maintenance and Net links pages. Bought Laura Lemay's HTML book. All testing with Netscape Navigator version 2.
6/96	Added Dilbert-cube picture to home page.
10/96	Added RSACi and SafeSurf PICS ratings.
1/97	First frames version: horizontal navigation frame with GIF pushbuttons (somebody get me an aspirin).
4/97	Added site map. All complex Web sites should have text maps, in my semi-humble opinion.
6/97	Guilted into doing some testing with Mosaic 2 and Explorer 3. Added vertical navigation frame option (also with buttons).
7/97	Submitted my URL to Alta Vista, Yahoo, and others.
9/97	Added short text links navigation frames (after seeing the site on a feeble old Mac II in 640×480 video mode). Total of four nav-frame options offered in this period.
12/97	Found Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on the Net. Started testing CyberSpyder link checker robot. Finally found out the <BASE> tag belongs in the header, in frames pages. D'oh!
1/98	Changed back to a no-frames layout, after a year of using various frames designs. Added page links to the Computech user-pages search page.
3/98	Made my recumbent bicycles content into a separate page.
1/99	Registered CyberSpyder link checker last month; ran it 1/9/99, and fixed all bad and redirected links. Added Netscape and Infi.net color charts (considering getting rid of "paper" background texture in favor of solid colors, for improved readability).
12/99	(Acquired used 512K PalmPilot Personal).
1/00	Moved site from Verio Spokane to Icehouse Net Services; removed direct email links, as an anti-spam measure; and switched from tiled paper-texture background to blue left-border effect, transparent background area. Added Web-browser tips and tricks page.
3/00	Added cascading style sheets (CSS) mostly because of the availability of Opera 3.
5/00	Reorganized all pages and implemented new breadcrumb-menu navigation scheme; reduced average page size from 21K to 7K (34 files to 91).
6/00	Added advertising-supported free site search courtesy of Searchbutton.com. PalmPilot/PDA content becomes separate page.
3/01	Switched to advertising-supported free site search courtesy of FreeFind; Searchbutton.com sent notices 3/3/01 they were discontinuing free site search service. Changed email feedback links in page footers from Juno to Excite Mail, due to uneven performance and poor design of the Juno Web-mail interface. Switched from Dilbert-cube picture to Tour des Lacs picture on home page.
5/01	Added small search box in navigation bar of home page, in addition to separate search page (5/15/2001). Removed search page table about usage of qualifiers and wildcards, replaced with mention of "search tips" link on results pages.
7/01	Greatly expanded my recumbent bicycle dealers pages, using a Google links-toolbar search button; in 2001 there were links to more than 390 dealers listed on the Web pages of BikeE, Vision, Rans, and Burley.
1/02	Changed from simple but too-long nested-list site map to more usable table-based map.
6/02	Changed from Excite-mail page footer links to Lycos mail (Excite had been giving me browser errors when trying to display messages).
4/04	Reworked table alignment CSS coding for all pages.
5/04	Resumed automated link checking with 32-bit version of CyberSpyder.
6/04	Switched to Andale Mono monospace as first-choice font for code examples (was Courier New) and URLs (was Verdana sans-serif).
7/04	Created "sidebar" CSS class, with 90%-size sans-serif text and blue left border, to more clearly identify ancillary material. Changed CSS font weight for all headings to normal, instead of the default bold.
10/04	Re-expanded my recumbent bicycle dealers pages to 349 dealers linked, using info from the Sun/EZ-1 and Burley sites' dealers pages. This resource was originally put together in 2001 based on the BikeE, Vision, and Rans sites, which were then the Big Three. BikeE and Vision went out of business in 2002 and early 2004, respectively.
10/04	Passed the WDG and W3C CSS validators. You can click the button to validate my site's primary style sheet, or click the following link to validate my alternate style sheet.
6/05	Changed from Lycos-mail page footer links to Yahoo! Mail.
7/05	Added Spam defense page.
10/05	Reorganized Inland Northwest links pages; formerly there were separate Spokane #1, Spokane #2, and North Idaho pages. This is the first time I've actually changed any page filenames on this site, but I couldn't think of a good alternative. I plan to leave the placeholder pages up for at least six months.
10/05	Simplified site map coding for better results in Opera and to eliminate horizontal scrolling in IE6.
11/05	Added Mobile computing and separate Browser Wars pages.
5/06	Added Cell phone links page.
6/06	Added CSS links rollover and printer-friendly formatting. The CSS rollover formats work in Firefox and Opera 8+ but not in Internet Explorer version 6.
10/06	Pulled placeholder pages from 10/05 reorganization of Inland Northwest pages, see above.
4/07	Switched from CyberSpyder link tester to the much faster Xenu's Link Sleuth.
8/07	Began checking site code using the Web Design Group and W3C HTML validators.
9/07	Switched all first and second level headings in the site (H1, H2 tags) from Verdana first choice to more-informal Comic Sans MS first choice. The smaller third level and below headings seemed better left in Verdana. This required changing one line in one style sheet file into two lines, and took about a minute.
9/07	All site code passes the Web Design Group and W3C HTML validators. Pages that have the "W3C HTML 4.01" button in the footer, such as this one, are claiming to be validated, and any user can verify the page still passes the test by clicking the button.
3/08	Switched first-choice font for code and URL elements from Web font Andale Mono to native Win2000 and WinXP font Lucida Console, which looks very similar. Most 2000/XP users were probably seeing those elements in Courier New.
1/09	Added Global warming page.
4/09	Switched to offline HTML validation, using the excellent HTML Validator Firefox add-on. I'm using its Tidy mode, which finds more errors than the W3C and WDG online validators.
7/09	Moved the whole site to my own domain, from Icehouse user-directory URL. This was also a move from a Windows server back to Unix/Linux; I had some issues briefly with capitalization of image filenames, which I resolved by changing them all to lowercase and fixing the HTML code. Added Google AdSense ads on selected pages, two days after the address change.
10/09	Changed the formatting of page menus and first headings for a more modern appearance, while remaining very readable.
11/09	Re-did the four Ubuntu-variant logos on the Linux distros page, so they all appear crisp and all have the three-arcs circle part of the logo the same size, or very close, within a pixel or so.
01/10	Moved cell phone links page from general interest section to mobile computing, because of the gradual shift from ordinary cell phones to smartphones.
02/10	Switched from page-footer email links obfuscated with HTML character entities to reCAPTCHA Mailhide, which lets you have email links on your Web pages, securely hide your email address from spam-bots, and at the same time help accurately digitize old books and newspapers, all for free.
04/10	Dropped my software page under "Links about computers"; its content duplicated other content about software under other categories.