How this site was built
Perspiration, inspiration, and insomnia - that's it! 
-- Well, there is
actually a bit more that I can usefully say!
My starting point was the design and styling of my already extant four websites (you can find links to those at the bottom of this page), but I was aware that they contained various rather amateurish aspects in their design, and this was my opportunity to try sharpening it all up and further enhancing the clarity and focus that I could achieve. I shall no doubt presently carry some of these improvements back to the other sites.
All along I've sought to keep things simple, without distractions. I've always had a great distaste for the majority of website designs I've seen, which, like so much poetry or contemporary music (certainly not all, though!), seek to impress with web-designer skills rather than communicate the site's content truly 'from the heart'.
I use no Flash or animations of any sort and indeed at the moment no embedded scripts at all apart from a little bit of Javascript to limit the size of 'comments' entries in the visitors' book for my other sites (this site doesn't have one, at least yet). All this site's visual effects are produced through careful use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
I've used the following software and resources to produce this site:
| Kompozer (actually the latest version of NVu) | Web page editor |
| Topstyle Pro | CSS stylesheet editor |
| Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and Opera | Browsers (Firefox being my primary one), for testing the display of CSS elements and styling |
| Magic Gallery | An inexpensive
but versatile photo
gallery creator which allows you to
create your own templates for gallery and single picture pages, and use
selected metadata information to label the displayed pictures and, e.g.
in my case, to display each picture's keywords. Magic Gallery produces
all the gallery pages, based on just two templates that I've
created - one for the gallery pages (tables of thumbnail images) and
one for the single-photo pages. It was a very fiddly and painstaking business creating my own templates, but, apart from rectifying the odd little 'teething trouble' bugs, I don't need to do any further work on those, so the initial rather stressful work on these was well worth the trouble. Magic Gallery is the only photo gallery program that I've so far encountered (out of many, including the monstrously large StudioLine Web) which actually enable me to use fully my own website and page design fully integrated with the galleries, but nonetheless I've been having problems with it because of some bugs and design flaws, and consequently I am now using XnView (see below), to batch-process all my photos before gallery creation - creating resized, already watermarked copies of the photos in a 'mirror' of my collection of originals, and then it's these which Magic Gallery processes to produce the galleries, so that it doesn't have to resize the photos itself. |
| XnView | I use it for the following main
functions:
One feature of XnView that is not yet implemented fully for my purposes is IPTC metadata entering and editing - specifially for selected groups of photos - and so until that functionality has been brought in, I use the following for that purpose... |
| Abander PhotosControl | A good photo manager, but
overall XnView (above) scores over it. However, it has one particular
speciality - as an IPTC metadata editor. I thus use it for entering
IPTC metadata (title,
description, copyright notice etc) in my photo image files. The program
has a few bugs which undermine its reliability, and a few features
including the help system aren't implemented (it's still a beta
version), but it still has by far
the best interface I've encountered for a picture metadata editor (IPTC
only; claims that it also edits EXIF data are untrue, and it views only
a few EXIF fields). This
program can nominally batch-rename the photo files, using metadata as
specified by the user, but it has a
glaring omission in that function's implementation, which makes it
useless for that purpose, but that doesn't matter to me now, because I
have XnView, which does the task just right. In March 2008 I abandoned PhotosControl in favour of the next item (despite the significant expense involved). I then discovered that something like a third of my photos had somehow acquired a crazy date / time with the year 2115 in the IPTC date / time fields, and although nothing is proven, evidence points to PhotosControl as having been the culprit, and for the date / time it couldn't have been displaying at all the true IPTC date/time, as it never showed the screwy dates. So on the current basis I wouldn't recommend it at all. |
| Photo Mechanic, from Camera Bits Inc. | My current IPTC editor - at a price! It can even do powerful batch search and replace operations on IPTC metadata. If the developers act upon various niggles that I have with the program at the moment it could become my complete photos manager, but at the moment I'm using it only for its metadata handling, and even that still has a few problems, which I'm expecting soon to be fixed. |
| Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 | For straightening images (it
degrades image sharpness significantly less than XnView does). Also for the production of graphics for gradient backgrounds, and the editing of bullet graphics. |
| FastTrack FTP | The best FTP
program I could find
for synchronizing folders and
enabling me to avoid re-uploading files which have been re-generated by
Magic Gallery during an update of a gallery but which have actually not
changed (because MG has no option to avoid completely re-generating a
gallery and all its pictures even if only one new picture has been
added or other single change made affecting that gallery). Unfortunately it has a bug which makes it very prone to upload files destined for a subfolder into the root folder in certain situations, so great vigilance is required when using the synchronization function. |
| Wise-FTP | This program also has a folder synchronization function, but that function is not properly implemented and doesn't work in a very helpful way. However, one thing it is good at is copying whole folders and creating destination subfolders where necessary, without being so inclined to incorrectly copy files into the remote root folder. I find its interface mostly more intuitive than Fast Track FTP. |
| The Clipart Site | I got most of my bullet graphics for lists from the Clipart Site's impressive free collection, then editing them (adjusting 'canvas' size and sometimes colour) for my specific purposes. |
| The PICS Favicon generator | For generating the site's Favicon.ico file |
| NMS FormMail | The script which I use for my Contact and picture ordering forms. Unlike most other form-mail scripts, this one has many security features, one of which is the facility for embedding recipient e-mail addresses in the script so that they do not have to be used in the web pages at all and thus spambots find no e-mail addresses to put on spammers' lists. |
| 1&1 | The current hosting company for this site. I don't have
enough experience of them yet to say whether I can recommend them, but
their packages are undoubtedly very good value - and if you sign up
with them through the link to them which I give here I would get a
small commission. However, my one experience with their Tech Support so far has been abysmal, with Tech Support staff clearly having been instructed to give answers taken from a small list of 'canned' responses regardless of the nature of the actual question, and no notion of passing the question to somebody who actually understands what the customer is on about. |
No deep linking!
All pages, images and other files on this site are COPYRIGHT, and posting of images from this site on other sites without my express permission is forbidden, as is deep linking to pictures or other non-page files on this site. On the other hand, links to any pages on this site are, of course, welcome.
As on my other sites, I do what I can to prevent or at least discourage deep linking to image / graphics files on this site. It is highly unsociable to deep link to files other than web pages on a site without express permission to do so (bandwidth theft and copyright infringement), and I note that the most common source of deep links to images on my sites has been forums, where irresponsible people are happy to steal bandwidth from my sites and of course to infringe copyright as though there were no tomorrow.
Deep linking to images on any of my sites is extremely pointless, because I quickly discover it through daily examination of my detailed website statistics, and these latter reveal to me the address of the web page with the offending picture link so that I can take targeted action against that link or indeed that site, blocking further accesses to that image from that site - and, in particular cases, substituting an 'Image blocked' image to display on that page. I could of course substitute something offensive (be warned!), but in practice that is something I wouldn't do, so the following is what would appear:
