Rhyader's Webpages

These are technical notes and comments for my webpages.
These are my personal webpages: they are about me and the things that I care to present and share with you; to babble or pontificate about, promote, decry, or whatever. I have links to business pages here, and talk about my "business", but business is not the primary purpose of these pages. I have tried to present my links in such a way as to make these pages a "navigational experience", like a journey. I like journeys, and think of life as a journey. And look carefully: on some pages, not all links are apparent as links, or labeled as such.
I hope that you will find my pages enjoyable; and perhaps you will send me some feedback on them.

I also have a glossary to help explain some of the technical terms included here.

My Pages, Home and More

My main pages are my home page  (home.html)  and my more page  (more.html).
Why two?   I have sized these pages so that the whole page will fit nicely on a small monitor screen. (See "video" below.)  If you have a larger monitor you will just have extra space. These two pages provide links (the gold buttons, and some other links) to the pages of my website.  Explore.  8)  

Video and Color

These pages are designed to look best when viewed in 800X600 resolution with 256 or more colors, on a small monitor screen.

I do not have fancy equipment. I don't have big screens. Hopefully I will before too long. 8)  
So I designed these pages to look good on my monitor. They are sized as indicated above, for either full screen or an almost full screen window. Note that color values differ slightly on different computers. They may look a bit different on a MacIntosh or Unix system. And even some monitors are brighter or darker than others. This should look reasonable, however, on any 256 color or better display.

Dark Colors

My dark colors may be hard to see on dim monitors or under bright room lighting conditions. If you find something too dark to see well, you might try turning up your monitor's brightness, or turning down the room lights. Some of my pages are dark because I like them that way. for more comments, click on the word dark.

Browsers

I wrote these pages to look good on Netscape. They will look best when viewed with Netscape version 4 or better at 800X600 resolution. But they should also look good with older versions of Netscape (Netscape 3) and with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, especially newer versions of Internet Explorer. They should be viewable with Mosaic or any graphical web browser, though things may line up strangely on some "other" browsers. They should even be legible to some extent with Lynx ; and I have some text-only webpages that are "Lynx inspected".

Browser Problems

Mosaic

Mosaic does some strange things. It will not obey some font commands that change the color of text. Result: my text won't look right in Mosaic; and some pages will be unreadable because Mosaic is using the same color for the text as the background color. I have no solution for this. It also does strange things with certain types of text. And things may line up differently in Mosaic.   Perhaps the worst inconsistency is that Mosaic does not handle Frames. If you try to use it to view a page written with frames, you may see nothing at all.
Also see my glossary entry on Mosaic and my bit about Mosaic in my geeknotes.

Lynx

There seem to be problems with some newer versions of Lynx. (See my text-only notes.)
If you encounter any other problems, please let me know.

Netscape

In the past I had a problem with Netscape 4 not loading some pages. That turned out to be caused by the comments, of all things. It seems to be solved now. But if you notice any bugs, let me know.

Sounds

I have inserted commands into a few of my pages for sounds. These commands attempt to cause your computer to load and play a wave file (.wav). They work in Netscape 3 and 4, Internet Explorer, and Mosaic. But with Mosaic and Internet Explorer, you may have to set your browser to accept this automatic launch feature.

Browser Differences

There are some minor differences between how Netscape (NS) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) do things. Older versions of IE are bad about aligning things correctly in tables, and don't display the colored borders around images that Netscape can. Also IE has bad looking "shading' in displaying the borders of tables. My tables look better in Netscape; it seems to display them better by default. Also, if you have a slow modem, you will notice that Netscape loads images more smoothly that IE. IE realigns things as it loads them, resulting in a "jumpy" effect. In general, I find the appearance of Netscape more pleasing than IE. But IE does gives you a lot of screen space, and it makes changing the default size of text easy.   Sometimes pages made for IE have a bar or margin on the left side that text stays out of, and some versions of NS may not support this. There are a few other syntax differences. But mainly these two browsers are what people use, and they look much the same.

With "other" browsers, meaning other than Netscape or Internet Explorer (like Mosaic ), things may look more different. Text, images, and tables may line up differently.

Supposedly, web authors should design their webpages to be readable in any major browser. Unfortunately, many do not.

Netscape Rant

See my Netscape Rant and my notes on using Netscape on my Geeknotes page.

Passwords

Some of my webpages are password protected, where you have to type a user name and password into a window to access a protected directory. This is called "User Authentication" or "Authentication Protocol". When using such protocols, please remember that the text is CASE SENSITIVE. When entering passwords into an authentication window please type the user names and passwords exactly as they are supposed to appear, including the case (capital or small) of the letters. For example: Bob, bob, and BoB, are three different names.  ( By the way, Lynx does support User Authentication. )

Creation

I wrote pages "by hand": that is - by typing the HTML code; not by using a program (frontpage, etc.) that writes HTML for you. This makes me learn HTML, gives you more control over how things look, and helps ensure that the material will be cross-platform compatible (viewable on different computer systems, Mac, unix, etc.) See more comments about this in my "Geek Notes". I use and highly recommend Textpad - the best text editor for Windows.

Construction

Some of my pages may be under construction, or planned but not done yet. If so you should see a "not yet", or "sorry" or "under construction" message. And, in truth, I do hope that my webpages will always be "under construction" to some extent. How dull to finish! I hope to always have more things to do.

Feedback

If you have any comments, questions, etc., about my webpages; please send them to me.
Especially if it's of a technical or professional nature.

Guestbook

I hope to implement a "guest book" eventually : but that's a low priority project. For now (or anytime) please send me your comments via E-mail.

You can check my "Guestbook" page (see the link on the MORE page) to see if I have made a Guestbook yet or not. If not, just use E-Mail and indicate if you want any part of it posted or not.

My Computers

I talk about my computers on my "About Me" page.
If you really want to read about my computers, then click here.