PhotoDude.com

Sun. Jun 29, 2003

Start Page v6.0

Start Page v6.0 – About the time that “portal” was the Buzzword of the Week, and companies fought to be your “home page/portal,” I decided to hand code the page that would load when my browser opened. It would always end up being “lighter” and certainly more tailored to my ever changing needs.

On this computer rat ’cheer (that’s Southern for “the computer on which I am currently typing”), I load it off my hard drive, but I also put it online, for whenever I might need it away from home. And, lo and behold, a few people started using it. Each time there is a style/structure change (6 so far), I hear at least one comment from one person about how I screwed up their home page. Change can be that way. However, (as I’ve done in the past), those who hate this new version will find relief in the upper right corner.

And there could be some legitimate reasons for using the old version this time around. I’ve tried to reduce the clutter and provide better organization by using dropdown lists (and, content wise, this is a work in progress). I’ve tried two different methods (settling on the one detailed here), and both cause scrolling oddities in my verion of IE (6.0 on XP). I’m not sure I understand why, and your mileage may vary. It’s just simple lists, some CSS, and some Javascript on a 46 KB page. IE acts like its rendering engine gets overloaded, and gives horizontal dropouts.

Anyway, it works wonderfully in my preferred browser, Mozilla, and, well, it’s all about me on this one. From browser, to color scheme, to best viewing resolution (1024×768), to the link selection itself, it’s custom made for my surfing pleasure. Probably reveals more about my surfing habits than I want to think about (and doesn’t even include the 70 or so RSS channels I track every couple of days). However, the page may crash your browser and/or convert your e-mails to vulgar Swahili.

As usual, fax me a copy of your receipt for this service, and the appropriate amount will be refunded to you.

And in other site news of total insignificance in your life, I am busy, busy, busy behind the scenes makin’ purdy stuff, thus less fun-filled curmudgeonly content here of late. But you’ll get to see it in a week or so.