Design  | SFC  |  NOS  |  Code |  Diary  | WWW |  Essay |  Cisco | [Home]

 

  

WWW pages

Tip of the week
(Enhancing metafiles)
If you have clip art images in a metafile format (such as WMF), they can be enhanced by putting a small drop shadow behind them (it only requires about 7 pixels, or so). Here's an example that I have used for my essay page:

Shadowed version

and the unshadowed version:

Unshadowed version

What do you think? Which is better? Maybe it would be better to look at the page in which it is used. Oh, and remember to scale the image down before you add your shadow. I've converted these ones from a 200 pixel width to a 100 pixel width, and then applied the shadow.

[Next tip]

GIF files

3739

HTML files

2271

JPEG files

853

PDF files

325

SWF files

138

ASP files

51

MDB files

2

AVI files

1

Total space: 340MB

My WWW site statistics (July 2001)

 

 

 

WWW pages of the past (July 2002)

July 2001
I've spent a good deal of time writing material for books in July (see diary page), so I have not had much time to improve the layout of my WWW pages. One advantage of spending more time writing is that I've got a lot more content to add. I've tried to add a few snippets on my essay page, as you can see on the right-hand side. These essays are hardly thought-provocing, but they're my attempts at trying to make computing material more readable. I'm still learning about this, but it's a start, anyway.

Many of the screen-shots that you see on these pages are taken so that they do not show the whole page. So, I've taken a screen-shot on my Home page, with three captures,and then I've pasted them together (see right-hand image).

As I said at the start of these pages, I think it is amazing how WWW page design has changed over such as short period of time. At present the pages I have presented look resonably well presented, but I bet in a couple of years time they will look a bit dated. So check back to this page in the year 2003, and see if I have been provided right. Otherwise, if they do not look dated, it's because that we have reached the end of the evolution in WWW page design. I hope that that never happens, but if it has, then it's full speed ahead for adding content (which I'm much better at).

The big problem is that the more content you add, the more difficult it becomes to change your pages. One way to overcome this is to add things to a database, but unfortunately, it would take a lifetime for me to do that. So I'm a bit stuck with the layout at present.

I've decided to try and monitor the growth in the number of pages which are added to my site. Thus on the WWW page of the past page, I've added a basic counter table. As you can see the largest amount of files are GIF files, closely followed by HTML files. There are more GIF files than HTML files as virtually every page has more than one GIF file on it (obviously many pages share the same graphics). Unfortunately there aren't a lot of ASP files, as I've got to port my WWW site between an IIS sever (which supports ASP), and an Apache sever (which supports PHP). If I could get complete access to an IIS would would convert many of my pages of ASP. At present I've also only got two Microsoft Access databases (MDB files), but hopefully this will increase once I have more time.

 

Complete screen shot of Home page July 2001 [Enlarge - See if you can find the joins]

Essay page July 2001 [Enlarge]

Essay page July 2001 [Enlarge]

Essay page July 2001 [Enlarge]