When Webdesigners Attack! Part Vii

[isami]

Just wanted to start a discussion and/or Q&A about webdesign and stuffage. Because I'm a geek and geeks love websites.
Yes they do. Or at least I do.


SO I dunno, wanna do fun website stories about your first little page on fotrune city or how you pwned java one day and opened your boss's CD drive?

I did that, it was really stupid. I almost got fired. I wouldn't reccomend it.

Or show of your mad HTML Skillz.

Anyway, I'm trying to learn PHP now. I haven't installed apache or mysql or any of that good stuff yet. How hard is it to get through?

[Free_to_Dream]

You're odd...but I want to do that if I know a lot of HTML skills. XD
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Haha, a retard's jumping out of the building. Talk about stupidity.

[Stratadrake]

My Angelfire site is sadly outdated. But that's the curse of running a personal site when you also attend more active sites AND forums....

I originally started my personal site on Geocities as a sort of true-life experiment with learning HTML. My Geocities address was /SiliconValley/Campus/4543/.

I wanted to start by listing a bunch of programming tricks, but honestly, as a senior in high school, I didn't know any!

After that I was into Descent 2 for awhile and I used my Geocities page to show some of the stuff I worked on. My Descent 2 days died with an older hard drive though, all I have left is one -- count 'em, ONE picture I printed out showing two of the custom robots I designed. I was a damn good 3D artist within the limited confines of Descent 2's model format....

After that, I basically rewrote my area from scratch to focus more on writing, and that's sorta how it's stayed since.

Then came the Yahoo/Geocities merger. My geocities site became /d2richard/ instead of the long address, but they still supported the long address format though.

I had my fair share of annoyance with the banner and pop-up ads, too.

But one fateful day Yahoo/Geocites sent out an e-mail announcement saying that they would no longer offer FTP access to free members. I use an FTP client for my file uploading because it's a heckuva lot easier than trying to use Geocities' built-in "File Manager".

I did consider payment options but Yahoo insisted on setting up a "Yahoo! Wallet" account so at that point I basically ditched Geocities and started looking.

That's when I found Angelfire. Since I manage my page's directory structure on my local HD, I can do all my edits offline and then upload the new files when I need to update. Angelfire address is /falcon/stratadrake/ .

I originally voted for pop-ups rather than banner ads for my Angelfire page, since I like to use frames and banners don't work real well with frames. That is, until the day that Angelfire declared that free members would get both popups [i]and[/i] banner ads.

A few days later I came up with a sterling workaround: Since I use frames, I just set an anchor tag near the top of all my HTML files. Angelfire's ad code always puts the ad immediately after the BODY tag and before anything else, including any anchor tags. From there, all my links and frameset documents don't just link to the HTML files themselves, they link to that starting anchor [i]within[/i] the HTML files.

The result? If you check out my Angelfire pages, the banner ads do show up, but the frames are automatically pre-scrolled far enough to hide them! B)

I was also in a group on a site we called pumpkin-2.co.uk (with forums), and for awhile I tinkered with PHP to come up with an automatic "noframes" script so that I could offer a noframes option for those who hate frames. I spent many, many hours writing about 10kb of PHP code to do automatic translating from frames to tables, and the end result was about 90% successful -- but that option died when the group lost the P-2 server.

So here I am, I have some extensive experience with hand-writing HTML, CSS, and even a little bit of PHP.
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[isami]

I agree that finding a good freeserver is a hellish task. I have a domain now as a gift from my uncle, and I'm beyond thankful for that.

If you ever needed a new place to go, I'd suggest using topcities. http://www.topcities.com

They're very good. They support FTP, which I adore (it IS so much simpler XD). They do forms, guestbooks, and all the usual great stuff. I think it's 150 megs of space and 600 megs of bandwidth.
The trick i use to getting around bandwidth issues with free servers is by using free filesharing or image storing sites that allow hotlinking, like photobucket. It takes a giant load off the site server.
Topcities also does the body tag thing. If you don't have a body tag in your document, they'll automatically use pop-ups. All you need to do is move to body tag all the way down to right before the tag to make it a foot banner, which is tolerable. And if you use CSS for your layouts and colors, all that jazz, it works even better.

My first website was an x-files fansite that I used templates for at fortunecity. Around 6th or 7th grade. Then I moved on to learn HTML and made a pokemon site and then a fanart site back before they had ones like these where you upload and get on with your life.
Oh yeah, talk about old-school; send an e-mail with your drawing and wait 3 weeks for it to be added. XD
That died with mediaminer and DA. I'd say around 2000 was the end of those.
(The pokemon site still exists, much to my dismay, and I can't log in anymore so I have no idea how to get rid of that embarrassing monstrosity)

I had started highschool and took a break. Then I created a site just for my own fanart, and anime mp3's and midi's. I scrapped the mp3's and midi's and added a shrine to all my favorite anime characters and couples. Named it "Hakkyou no Ichidou" which means shrine/temple of madness (i think), XD. That site i've had for about 3 1/2 years now, it's evolved into a lot more, along with my HTML skills.

That site saw all my experiments, from tables to frames, my discovery of the

tag and CSS, even some small attemps at java. Ah, memories.

I'm happy with it. ^^

That's my own little adventure.