About the site
A little less than a decade ago, I got 10 megabytes of complimentary web space from my internet service provider along with several e-mail addresses. Wanting to put my mark on the net, I created my first web page in Microsoft Word. Everything was going fine. My site got bigger and bigger, and Word even gave me frames. It was when I wanted to put some code on my site from somewhere else that the need to know how to write HTML caught up with me. No matter what I did in Word, the block would not go where I wanted it. I got the message, learn how to code a web page. Before that moment I did not care about the markup, I just wanted my pages to look pretty.
At first I found a site here and there which told me what all those things meant in between the < and >. With just the basics, I started to rewrite my site. I kept the frames and still did a lot wrong. I had deprecated tags everywhere. The amount of <font> tags was enough to make some throw their hands up in the air in exasperation. Not only did I have a lot of deprecated tags, I had tags unclosed. I just plain did not get it.
It took some very patient people talking me through my hysterics when something on my site did not work to finally get my site looking better and most areas working right. Then I ran out of space. I had filled my 10 megabytes rather quickly. Hysterics ensued. That is when someone casually mentioned CSS. When I saw what one line of CSS could do to cut my page size down, I nearly cried (or did I actually feel a tear?). Within weeks the size of my site was down by more than 75%. After that my whole coding philosophy became small is beautiful.
Let's pause for a moment. At that time the only browser on my computer was Internet Explorer. I was still a very lazy coder, so some of my HTML was browser specific. I was not writing for the masses, just those who were using IE. Then along came Firefox becoming the cause for a fresh bought of hysterics. I am still having cross browser issues, but they are not critical.
The main issue that caused my headaches was the fact that my frames looked bad in Firefox. So, I had to find another way of making my pages look and act the same without frames. That is my introduction to <divs>s and in CSS scrolling. The problem with getting rid of the frames was that I would have to put the same stuff on all of the pages, making them bigger. I didn't want that. Then I was introduced to Server Side Includes. It was a miracle to me. I could put all kinds of stuff into one file and have it read by another. So slowly I had been altering all of my pages to have SSI.
After telling someone that I use SSI on my site, I was told that Perl would do a better job. So now I am trying to learn Perl so that it can be the foundation of this site.