Category: Tech

Geez, this has all been about the strike recently. Guess what’s been on my mind.

There’s a guy, Dave Pell, who sends out his take on the news each day with links to articles from various sources. His site’s called NextDraft. He’s been focusing a lot on the terrorism/war thing recently, so if that’s what you’re into, subscribe.

Feeling somewhat apathetic today. That’s a problem.

There’s a thing going on with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) right now, under most people’s radar—they want to recommend a new patent policy that will essentially give a green light to companies developing web technologies and patenting them to charge royalties. We probably don’t want the web’s only effective standards body recommending that. [See Zeldman’s far more thoughtful and knowledgeable summary.] You should probably read it and write to them. [I did.] The deadline is tomorrow.

By request: So you want a website? There are tons of ways to get started. Resources include everything from free server space on GeoCities and numerous others, with pre-coded templates (useful for beginners — little to no HTML!), to WebReference and WDVL and c|net’s Builder.com, to… well, you get the point.

As most people probably did (?), I started learning HTML by simply looking at existing code and mimicking it; and then learned by doing, by example, by asking, and using various reference materials like the ones above (though, for the record, I only used GeoCities for the space, and that was long before Yahoo! bought them out). [I can hardly believe that link is still good. – gohlkus, 2/21/07 … and again 8/4/10!]

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From the former news section: I took a few days off of gohlkusmaximus. I needed to—I was obsessed for about 3 days with simply getting it to a point I felt okay about uploading.

I actually told someone about this site—hi, Matthew—who asked for the aforementioned HTML reference links.

Back to work—I’m redesigning a rather popular on-line application (the Recreation Compass) right now—I think it’s turning out pretty well. I’ll post a link when it’s available, and it’ll probably end up in the portfolio.

Anyone know what the laws are on using work that belongs to an employer (present or otherwise) in your portfolio? Most people do it, so I assume it’s okay, but it’s worth checking. Contact me if you know for sure.

Know what else? Netscape 4.72 for Windows sucks. [Ed. To be fair, so do many other earlier and later versions of Netscape and IE. In fact, all browsers suck. There. I’ve said it.] I had to put line breaks before all my <p> tags to get the default paragraph style to work. Seems that, for some reason, if you butt a </p> right up next to a <p> (as I do when I’m handcoding and it’s not for work), it makes the text size of the second paragraph 75% of the size of the previous paragraph’s text, not of the default text size. This translates to “bad.”

This is an example of the “diminishing returns” effect…

…if you have an old version of Netscape…

I’M SHRINKING!

The above 3 paragraphs look much more dramatic in Netscape 4.something.

Whew, much better. If you don’t know HTML, sorry about that little rant. It makes me feel better to get it out.