About this Site

Purpose

Apart from allowing me to display photos of my family, one of the main purposes of this site is to help me practice my web building skills. If you've had a chance to read my bio or resume,  you will have seen that I recently joined an internet consulting company where I build web sites (among other responsibilities).

Development Tools

Microsoft FrontPage - I use this for creating & maintaining the pages. It's probably a good choice for those getting started although it does have an annoying habit of messing up hand coded pages.

• Paint Shop Pro - I lack any artistic ability but when I have to create art for this site I use Paint Shop Pro.  I used the trial version of Paint Shop for a long time and felt I owed it to the developers to pay up.

• 3D Impact - I recently downloaded 3D Impact to create the 3D title on the main page. Quite a fun thing to use for interesting 3D effects.

• When I need to create animated GIFs I use Animation Shop which came with my copy of Paint Shop Pro.

• There are several Java applets on this site, a couple of which I created myself.  There is an interesting Java applet as the title of my resume.  This came from a package called AppletFx

• The Odd Spot page uses a CGI(Perl) script to extract a piece of a web page from the Melbourne Age newspaper web site. This technique was highlighted in a recent article on the Web Review web site.

• The main page (with the highlights & 'whats new' boxes) has a visit tracker ("You have visited this site x times) using JavaScript and a cookie.   This page also has a clock written in JavaScript.

• The guestbook is written using CGI(Perl) and I believe it came from Matt's Archive.  I also use MailForm (another of Matt's CGI scripts), to process the results of my survey.

• You may (or may not) see an animated cursor when you move your mouse across this page.  This is a nifty little technology from Comet Systems. (I think the animated GIFs on this page may make the cursor flicker which is a shame).

• This site uses a lot of gratuitous graphics which I have 'collected' while surfing.  I would give credit to the creators if I could remember who they were.

Resources for Web Developers

If you have some interest in developing or extending you own site, I have compiled a list of some of the web site developer resources I use most often for this and other web sites that I am involved with.