This is where I'll explain the tools I used to give birth to this GREAT (...) website, so other enthusiasts of web designing will be able to challenge me in this master art (..........).
- Dreamweaver: how could I have done this website without this great tool by Macromedia, I don't know. The extensions I used are the very useful tools by Studio VII (Layer Animagic and Snap layer) and the Open Picture Window Fever, which you can see applied in the Fun/Pictures section. Everything else are resident functions of Dreamweaver (I am proud I didn't use any prefabricated Flash-based menu bar, all you see are animated GIF's, swap image triggers, and Layer animation/snaps).
- Fireworks: other tool by Macromedia, here used to prepare the thumbnails for the Pictures section, and to scale the quality of each image in this website (I made everything I could to cut the size of the pictures), not forgetting it was a handful tool to design the frames for some of the animated GIF's I used in the menu.
- Photoshop: auxiliary tool I used to refine transparencies, smooth pictures, restyle the current background image of the Menu, and modify the frames anf some animated GIF's.
- Ulead GIF Animator: leading tool for animating and compressing GIF's, used on the animated selectors of the menu, and for the counter mask.
- Ulead Cool 3D: all the text buttons on the Menu have been done using this tool.
- Internet
Explorer: yes, it can come handy when you want to save offline
copies of other websites which implement nice characteristic, so you can
analyse the code
- Notepad: no comments, other than this: sometimes it's frustrating to use Dreamweaver when you simply need to change a page title, or edit a style sheet document, or perform advanced copy/paste sequences.
- mIRC: yes, it is right now my only tool for programming: all the automated tasks like updating the MP3 list page, adding the same <SCRIPT> tag in every HTML, with a reference to the same file in the site root, thus with a different relative path, and complex code checking and changing to update the ZIP link syste with the current JavaScript one, have been developed in mIRC's scripting language.
- razza.org: the last hosting service I am using.
It runs on a private server, and there are no ads, since the owner does
it just for the sake of it
- Brinkster's free ASP hosting: my free host doesn't support ASP and server side tasks (obviously, what would you expect), so I had to use Brinkster's service (also this one free and bannerless) to host the ASP code and the Access database for the Guestbook pages.
- ASP Text counter: it's the counter featured here, after having removed the graphic one, which got limited to 500 hits per day. This is in plain text format, much faster to download.
- FlashFXP: client used for uploads (Brinkster uses a web interface).
- Patience and devotion
- Eclecticism: won't you think ALL of the material
included in here is my personal production? I obviously had to download
pictures from the net, as well as videos, songs, MIDI's, and free tools,
and use other's ASCII works to host in the Fun section, also organizing
quotes by others (but all the "management" work is mine, none
of the websites I took the material from was as nice as mine
) - JavaScript:
last but not least, this is the part that took the most of my mental resources.
I am talking about hand-made JS code, which you can admire if you are
smart enough to get it's location
- Creativity: even if I know nothing about ASP, I modifed the ASP script of the guestbook, and I added other two records in its database to store an icon and a smiley reference. Now it is MUCH better than the original, which anyway was really cool itself.