How this page comes to be..

[a different horizontal rule]

Whaz da point wid dis ear page, Homer?

The general stuff

So why would anyone put up one more personal home page? Like all others that I've seen, this one is to satisfy one or more preceived needs. One of the purposes of this set of pages was to provide me with a better way to deal with the organization of my own book marks. I wanted an easy way to get access to a selection of sites that I frequently find useful and or interesting.
I wanted a nice easy way to show friends and clients some portion of the wealth available on the web. Besides, for those folks not equipped with pocket protectors and propellor beanies it is nice to be able to suggest a single URL where they can be assured of easily finding something of interest to them personally.
Being a reasonably lazy fellow, it seemed to me that I might solve all of these problems with a single set of web pages. You are looking at the result.
No attempt, other than word of mouth and email announcements to clients and personal friends has been made to publicize these pages. If you found them by some other means I would very much appreciate knowing about it.

The technical stuff

For various reasons the HTML for these pages was written with a DOS text editor. Although I'm sure that many folks would rather avoid coding or programming of any kind not done with a mouse, I have never found a better way to achieve results. The learning curve for HTML (IMHO) is not as steep as the one for spreadsheets.
A design goal was to keep these pages reasonably small while hopefully avoiding visual boredom. The purpose of the design goal was to make average page load time as short as possible consistant with a reasonably attractive page appearance. In order to accomplish my goals with the pages, the graphics are mostly small which results in the entire set of pages taking up about 180K. Also, I have tended to minimize the graphics on "text rich" pages, partly to keep the overall size down, partly to keep the size of any one page reasonably small, and partly because I believe that text rich content is better presented, for those who wish to make use of it, with few distracting elements.
The 180K for the whole set of pages is split among 25 separate pages of varying lengths. This means to load the "average page of the set of 25" means to request and receive less than 8K bytes. The text of the pages themselves is less than 74K of the 180K total. The rest (100+K) is taken up with the 27 graphics files. That is to say that the text of the "average page" should only require the request and receive of less than 3K bytes.
If you are a lynx user or tend to surf with the autoload images set to off, these pages should load quite quickly. This is because your browser only needs to retrieve and load a small number of bytes (3K each, see above.) at one time as you move through the local links.
Among other things done to make this a fast loading set of pages, the background is the same 2 inch square JPEG file throughout. For those wishing to know, the JPEG file was a product of Micrographx Picture Publisher. More to the point, the edgeless effect was achieved by tiling 5 identical images on to a 6 inch by 6 inch square and then blending the edge areas. Also various color changes to the original file (see the Credit Page) were done with Picture Publisher. If your browser has a working cache, the small JPEG file that paints the background should only be retrieved once even if you actually look at all 25 pages. Right! and each writer of the Great American Novel will not only get published and rich, but will also win the Nobel for litter a sure.

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