The Furnace: Information about this web site.

Updates and linking to the site.

It is intended to update this site at least once a month, though I may not have time to do so and I make no assurance that I will. In any case each update may change the way the site is laid out, and in fact as I learn more about HTML and JavaScript as well as site design it is certain that the site will change. With this in mind please do not provide links to this site other than to the home page, which I intend to try to keep on the same URL. If you break this rule please be prepared to check your links at least once a month.

Construction.

This site was written manually in a text editor on a Mac, no authoring packages here. Given that it is produced by a relative newcomer to web design and coding there may be a few errors (I am approximately human); if you find any please visit the contact page, get my email address and let me know so I can put things right. If you think you have advice that will improve the site contact me in the same way and I'll happily read what you have to say. This site is dedicated mainly to artwork produced by me so it is graphically intensive in places, which means if you're on a dial-up connection you will find it requires patience at times. I hope you find the images worth the wait.

Learning HTML and JavaScript.

My attitude to setting up a web site was that I wanted to learn HTML and JavaScript and then build the site in a text editor. To some this may seem mad with all the site builder tools available, but the code turned out by an educated human being is almost always smaller and faster. This in turn makes the site load and work faster. If this site becomes complicated in structure (very unlikely) then I might start to use a site editing tool, but then I will benefit from being able to tweak and trim the code turned out by the software. As I used to be a computer programmer learning HTML seemed likely to be just like learning another programming language - so I dreaded it. Once I started it actually took only three days to learn enough HTML to do this entire site in its original form. HTML is not hard to use so I really would recommend learning to do it that way.

This site is also designed in a manner that should work properly in any standard browser, though unlike the original version the current version is not designed to be usable with non-graphical browsers or with graphics switched off. It should still load and display quickly even on a dial-up connection, except for some of the images in the art galleries, which may take a while but which I hope are worth waiting for. If you find small hairline gaps in the graphics where they should match up and they don't, then you are probably using an out of date version of Internet Explorer; later versions do not contain the bug that causes this problem.

While learning I believe I was aided by the very high quality of the books I chose, so here I am reporting the information you would need to order them in the UK and USA; in most English-speaking countries you can probably make use of the same information. The HTML book divides the task of learning basic HTML (and XHTML if you're bothered) into a set of lessons designed to take about ten minutes, hence the slightly startling title, while the JavaScript book uses twenty-four one hour lessons. I recommend both books.