Site details

Browsers

The site is written to work in all browsers with a reasonable degree of compliance to W3C standards, particularly CSS-2.

It was tested in Netscape 6 and (Windows) Internet Explorer 5.5. (There are a few minor workarounds to make IE work, because IE's standards support is not quite as good.)

In older browser versions, it looks a mess, but hopefully you can make out the content. I am capable of developing pages that work in the horribly-broken monstrosity that is Netscape 4, but since this is my personal site, I chose not to.

Software

This site was developed using Adobe Photoshop 5 LE (so I'm cheap) and Notepad. Because it is so small, I didn't need to use XML-based automation.

Typography

Headings are in Bitstream's Cheltenham BT (actually called 'Cheltnhm' but I expect they meant the full name), italic and bold-italic, at 40, 60, and 80 pixels. I really love the bold-italic letter-shapes for 'sam'. Mmmm.

Body text is set in 14-pixel Verdana. One of my personal crusades is against the plague of 'tiny-type' that seems to have swept the Web, with 12-pixel and even smaller type becoming commonplace... trust me, I don't play that.

Photography

The photograph of me was taken in Summer 2000; I was on holiday with my parents, and my dad took the photo. (He is a photographer, but wouldn't like to be judged by that picture; if you want to see some of his work, check out his own site.)

I cut mys'elf out from the original photo in order to get the picture on this site. The original was of me in a church; the lighting is slightly strange due to stained-glass windows. I'm leaning on a pew.

Note on the subconscious mind

The brown horizontal bars over the picture of me were added because I needed something for me to lean on, replacing the pew I cut out. I also needed something to cover the fact that I really didn't feel like doing an accurate mask around my feet (which were in the picture but it had completely dissolved into shadow by that point, so I'd basically have had to draw the outlines from scratch), so that's why I am standing behind the large brown bar at the bottom.

After I'd continued the motif, I realised that it looks a little like those prison/military photos where they have lines behind them to indicate height; ah well, I thought.

Much later I realised that I may have been subconsciously inspired by the anime series 'Irresponsible Captain Tylor', which I'd been watching at the time. The series eyecatch (brief sequence before and after commercial break) consists of a quick succession of cast drawings, complete with the 'height bars'. Too close a similarity for coincidence, probably... ah well, the mind works in mysterious ways, etc.