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How does he do it, folks?Or, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...
Yes: I can
<Gasp!> He's not using a
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Recently (01/99) I've had the domain name finchhaven.com registered at NSI, through register.com, and I'm having www.finchhaven.com hosted at SiteAmerica.
My original ISP, Winstar/Northwest Nexus/halcyon.com was just way too expensive: $50.00 monthly with no annual discount for "Web Presence" and a paltry 5mb disk space! An additional 10mb (15mb total..) would cost another $10.00 monthly so I'd be up to $720.00 a year! Forget it!
And, to boot, their service is really crappy! I was waiting for a call-back from their Sales line (they don't answer: you leave a voice-mail and they get back to you!) when I surfed into SiteAmerica, checked them out, and signed up online for an entire year! Sales@Northwest Nexus never did call back!
SiteAmerica costs $25.00 monthly with a 20% discount for an annual payment. This gets me 20mb disk space; up to 1gb of data transfer a month; 1 POP3 account and unlimited aliases; 24/7 ftp access; etc etc..
And it's hosted on a big system on a big pipe that's got a lot of redundancy...
So halcyon.com and worldnet.att.net are going to move into the background as dialup access providers only, and my web pages will be all-and-only on SiteAmerica as www.finchhaven.com!
So, we'll see... In the short run, only maintaining one web site is going to simplify life tremendously (HEY! This is only a hobby!) and in the long run I think the costs are going to be lower for a lot more disk space - which I have plans for - can you say Sony Digital Mavica?
Although www.FinchHaven.com started in the summer of 1995, locally at home on my machine little_guy using Microsoft's Personal Web Server and Notepad, I quickly put it up onto my first ISP, www.halcyon.com
My first method was to work remotely, using my Premium dial-up PPP access to halcyon.com through Windows 95.
I ran one or two telnet sessions on coho.halcyon.com using NetTerm 32, and used Whisper FTP Explorer ver 1.0f for file transfers up and down.
Once I had telneted to coho, I ran pico as the editor, remotely on coho.
I also ran one instance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 to actually view the pages which I wrote using pico. After editing in pico, I would ctrl-o to write the file out, alt-tab to IE 3.02, and right-click-refresh or f5 to reload the page.
This method worked well, and when I was using two frames (name="f001" and "f002" at frameset..) I only needed to reload the contents of the frame I was working on, not the whole bloody thing.
But, I had a problem with the major search services linking into specific web pages without coming through index.htm, and that didn't set up my <frameset> properly, and that caused no end of problems when viewers would navigate onward to other of my pages without the frames being correct.
So, I've moved away from frames to experiment with page layout using tables - which is a supposed no-no - but which seems to work quite well. One particularly nice thing about tables is the ability to specify a width for the table, and individual table cells, in a percentage of the display screen width. This seems to compensate well for different screen sizes or screen resolutions.
More recently, due to the ease of ftp'ing files up and down (now using CuteFTP [highly Recommended!], I've recreated my directory structure onto my local machine, and now edit my pages locally using Super NoteTab v2.63e from Eric G.V. Fookes.
I still run one local instance of Netscape Navigator 4.5 that loads my index.htm, just like when I worked remotely on www.halcyon.com, and again I right-click-refresh or use f5 to reload the edited page. I alt-tab back and forth from Super NoteTab to Navigator as needed.
A most wonderful recent addition has been html Power Tools from OppoSite Software. This suite contains an html syntax analyzer, a tag-pair fixer, an img sizer, a search-and-replace utility, a meta-tag manager, a date-stamper, and an html-to-text converter.
Each of these tools can work on a single page, or a user-defined project, which can be an entire web site.
When I added worldnet.att.net as my second ISP, I would just ftp my halcyon.com files down to my local machine into a second directory structure, edit the pages for bgcolor and rename the links back to the home page so that they refer to Daughter of FinchHaven, and then ftp them back up onto worldnet.
One of the first things I did was to set a different background color with <BODY BGCOLOR="#9999cc"> at worldnet.att.net to keep the two distinct visually.
And, other than that, I just hack it out...
Supporting stuff:
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This page last preened at www.FinchHaven.com by Webmaster on
This site has nothing to do with the deCSS software for DVD's!
So, deal with it!