 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
The Campbeltown & Kintyre site was started way back in early 1995. In these days my web space allocation amounted to an enormous 50K - not much more than one small image by today's standards. It was developed entirely using Windows Notepad as in these days there weren't many professional tools around. That prevailed as my editor of choice until I came across HTML-Kit, on the W3C web site. For died-in-the-wool HTML coders it's great - it minimises your mistakes and "beautifies your code" - but it's not WYSIWYG and doesn't generate HTML for you like some tools.
All that changed when I decided to re-design the site and bring it into the 21st Century. I also took the chance to get rid of the dreaded <font> tag and standardise on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). After looking around at various tools I settled with Macromedia Dreamweaver for page layout and site management, and its sister product Fireworks for graphics. I still use HTML-Kit in certain scenarios, but Dreamweaver gives me a lot of control over the HTML code and doesn't generate "code bloat". HTML-Kit also checks the code for conformance with standards, so I can keep an eye on the Dreamweaver output, as well as check for unintentional human errors! :-)
Update October 2010. I originally started this site to gain experience of web page design however at the time there was little material on the web about Campbeltown and as such it became a home for all things related to Kintyre. I took the site down in November 2003 as I was changing ISPs but also became aware that one particular section, "The Midges page" was being used as a source of email addresses for spam engines. My intention was to get it back online with a secure login process that would protect the personal information of the entrants on the midges page but ...... it took a bit longer than intended. So I've decided to put the site back online and to use the rebuilding of it as a learning exercise in the use of more contemporary web technologies. As it stands today the site is pretty much as it was when I took it down in 2003 but with the dead links removed and some changes where information was badly out of date. If you see anything that's either wrong misrepresented please let me know. Over the coming months the intention is to modernise it, get rid of the frames and hopefully return the midges page in a more secure and dynamic format.
Update June 2014. The site has been offline again for a couple of years however, as a Microsoft employee, I decided to use my employee benefits and try to get it back online, but this time running on Microsoft Azure cloud services. Can't believe how simple it was. Signed up, the whole thing uploaded, DNS records sorted, all in somewhere less than 30 minutes. So the plan now is to try to implement the security changes that I attempted (and failed at) back in 2010/11 using all the power of Azure services