My Web Site Dairy

My Web Site Diary

RANTING OF A CONFUSED PERSON

DC Section | Marvel Section | Ducks (Disney) | Gold Key & Misc. (Non-Disney)

Below is the way I created my web site. The information is over a year old, but is still correct. The best advice for a novice starting a web site or web page is to break up different functions into one test page. Make a lot of tests & do not get discouraged. Most Internet service providers give you a limited amount of web space for free. You can use this to see if you can get your first web page to work. It took me a year before any one sent me an e-mail on my web site. Most people would get discouraged when they do so much work & have little or no feed back. I was fortunate, because I was making my web site for me & since I spent no money on it, the lack of feedback did not bother me (much). There is a certain satisfaction in making a web page work. You can also force all you friends with Internet access to visit your site (this is little consolation when your friend has little or no interest). Good Luck!!!

Yes I know ZDTV is now Tech TV, but the links still work & I do not feel like changing them.

In October (1998) I got my new computer. I was excited. Now I could get my comic books in order and play games as well. The guy at the computer store told me that my idea to post my comic collection on the web was problematic if not impossible. He sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. So I thought I would put it on the web with no pictures. Boring! I was not concerned comic books are a hobby and I have better things that I can do with my computer.

The first day I was on the web I found lots of cool stuff. Although, it did not register at the time I knew the computer salesman was full of hot air.

Then I started watching Call for Help and The Screen Savers on ZDTV. ZDTV's slogan is Amaze Yourself . Because of their show I learned that the only thing that limited my computer was my imagination. Every day I learned more of my computers capability. I was amazed. What does this have to do with building a web sight? I needed to understand a few basics before I could make a web sight. It was on the Screen Savers that I learned about Front Page Express . A free program that was already on my computer.

In the beginning

Using Front Page Express (Netscape has a similar program Netscape Communicator) I created my first web page it was "HI". Not a very complicated web page but it accomplished it's propose. That I could publish text as easy as using word processing program (note: Front Page Express does not have a spell checker).

Next I pasted an image. I learned a lot doing this, web pages need jpgs or gifs (these are files that end in .jpg and .gif). Well all I had were bmp and tifs. These are easy to convert by copying an image and pasting it on the web page. This takes a little RAM, I have 96 k, but it is pretty easy to do. I like to use Adobe Photo Deluxe (It came with my scanner). It does not compress the picture as much and you can convert it into about ten different formats.

Now I could make a web page but could I put it on the net? It was not as easy as I thought. I learned that I could get a free web sight at WBS and so can you. Well I went to their web page and fooled around and accidentally posted my web page. That answered question one. But I could not get my images on the sight. What was wrong? It took me days to figure out that the images were not there because I did not upload them( note: you have to upload your web page and your images separately if you save your web page to your hard drive and then upload). Boy did I feel stupid.

Then I spent weeks finding web sights that I liked and tore them apart (right click on a web sight and view source). Anything I found interesting I would copy the code and try to make it work on my web page. I also explored Front Page Express to see what all I could do. Since most web pages have other pages ,creating hyperlinks, it is important to thing to know about. Inserting a marquee is the easiest.

I left out a lot . The best way to learn is by doing. I learned more from my mistakes than I did when something I tried worked.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

All my animation's are Java applets that I got free from HTML Constellation. I downloaded it from ZDTV's software library.

Ghost in the machine.

I do not know why my computer behaves the way that it does sometimes and it drives me nuts. The first bug was the mystery of the flickering monitor and the machine constantly wanting to log on to the Internet. I put these together because both problems were resolved by turning off active desktop. It is a windows 98 "feature" and not a bug. It is pretty cool if your on a LAN ( cable modem or static IP address if your computer is on you are online). I was not. The next ghost was actually the first ghost the mysterious "log on enter name and password". This was easy to fix all you have to do log off as something different say, superman and do not enter a password. Boom another dead ghost. The worst ghosts come from Front Page Express. My big problem is that I know this web page was going to take hours and hours. How do I save this web page? The first time I did not. Hours of work straight to cyber heaven. The ghosts are responsible. They are very friendly but they do not speak English. They speak in broken sentences. Like: critical error, unable to perform operation, error, unable to find, file not found. I think the critical error ghost got my first web page. I am sure he was trying to tell me I was going lose my data but, since, I do not understand most ghosts I ignore them. Why did I lose hours of work? I tried to save it. You would think if you go to save it that would happen. The critical error was that clicked on save instead of save as.

Uploading images

I think there is an easier way to post web pages. I am sure that the web publishing wizard is an easier way to upload a web page but I wanted to know what was going on. I was able to upload a web page but only one image was uploaded. Casper and his buddies hid all but one of my images. The image that uploaded had a HTML code that looked like this: img src=file:///windows/desktop/html/dc.jpg. This is the address and the code for an image. It tells where the image is. The address for the next image was: //desktop/html/action.jpg. The images were on my hard drive but not on the web. What were the ghosts doing? It was Front Page's publishing wizard pointing to the location of the file prior to saving the file. The way I got the images to upload is to upload them separately and change there address by deleting the file:///windows/desktop/html/ part up to the name of the image: dc.jpg.

Good Tip (how I do it now)

It helps to keep all files that are part of a web page in the same file. If you have saved the file (the web page) to your hard drive, with all associated images to the same file, you can just, type the file name (ie. dc.jpg) when you insert an image to avoid the problems outlined earlier.

Also, learn about FTP (file transfer protocol) it will save you a lot of time.

This is me (Kit) standing on a rocky outcropping over looking the Grand Canyon. Over my left shoulder is the Colorado River, at least 1000 feet below. On my right a rocky ravine 400 feet below. To get to this position I had to jump a 4-6 foot gap. It was soon overrun by tourists from the far east & I do not mean from New York.

My brother Scott made a web page like this. The reason I am making this one is because I can say anything I want. I am in my 40's. I am retired from the United States Navy ( an acronym for Never Again Volunteer Yourself). I cleaned Submarines & in my spare time operated a Nuclear Reactor (Hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of shear terror). Although, I joke about it, the Navy was square with me. You even got cool titles. Mine is Kit Randall Walvoord MM1/SS retired. I am divorced white male with a seventeen year old son that lives with me. I do not believe that the Internet is a good place to meet people. People seem to want to be someone other than who they are. (this excludes people I meet that are interested in comics. The internet is a good way to find people that are interested in the same things that you are. i.e.. comic books). My hobbies include collecting comic books (buying, selling & reading, the whole nine yards), making web pages, travel & having my dog pull me on a skateboard around the park. Me & my dog skate boarding in the park 1.75 Megs Avi I am obviously obsessed with this comic book thing. I do not need to make any money, so I have about as twice as many comics as I had when I started. I am even selling comics I don't even own.

I get about a hundred e-mails a month (I have been getting a lot more), about comics, from all over the world. It is so cool. I get some of the best comics to read. The more e-mail I get the more I get motivated to add more comics. I have been frustrated lately. All the web servers have gone off line.

My site is constantly evolving. I first started with free web pages. The free sites have all since gone out of business. When that happens, I move it. I have thousands of pages that I can no longer update. They have bad links & some have comics listed that I no longer have & some pages have more. If I could kill the old site I would. It is basically a copy of the same pages & has not been updated in a while. There are some pages that are lost forever & I have no Idea where they are located. If you end up on one of the old pages, it will have an nbci address, a nbci advertisement that takes over the top portion of your browser. Nbci said that they would take them down in July, but they are still up. My web site was scatted over 6 different web severs all over the world, at one time. All the old web sites are now down.