I was slow to pick up on the wonders of the world wide web. I was immersed in the usenet newsgroups and email listserves. I had even begun to use Gopher on occasion. But I finally got the word that Mosaic and the World Wide Web was where everything would appear -- hypertext was heady stuff. So about 1994 I took a half-day free class in html basics, and proceeded to set up a home page on my university account. I found it a very convenient way to make my climbing trip reports available to my climber friends, and that's about all I did with it. I used vi on unix (I could log onto and manage my html directory at Pitt) or QEDIT on my DOS machine to do the simple html coding. I could use the html to add photos and format my reports.

Then about 1995 or 1996 I got a Windows maching (Windows NT) and started using MS WORD to write my reports. It was much easier to insert the photos and the formatting when I was using MSWORD. And I could save the Word document as an html file. My first experience with WYSIWYG -- Trouble was, what I saw in Word was not exactly (sometimes not even close to) what I got on the web. And editing the html code produced by WORD was a bear of a job. I was not sold on WYSIWIG.

In 2001 I got a suite of Adobe programs, including GoLive. I put in a good many hours trying to learn GoLive, and I produced some pretty good pages - certainly fancier than what I could do with my basic html. By the way, My CLIMBING page was produced on GoLive. However, I didn't learn it well enough to feel comfortable. I really ran into some snags in trying to place some images in their proper space on the page. It is only in October 2005 that I finally got rid of the GoLive coding for the Navigation Bar and changed it to my more standard format - the one you see on this page. It is not as pretty (the colors are jarring, and the shapes are all rectangular and flat). However, it is logical and straightforward - hence easier for me to maintain.

When I retired and got a new ISP with some new website allocations, I decided to go back to doing the entire job in HTML -- I felt that then I could control it and would understand whatever I put up. I am happy with this decision, and am learning more each day as I work on this. I took a Hewlett-Packard sponsored on-line course in building your first website. It wasn't a perfect course, but I learned something with each lesson, and the class message board (though not well planned nor managed) was especially valuable. The students ranged from absolute beginners (some of whom were completely lost from the first class on) to professionals. We all learned from the course. That course really led to the form of my website as you see it.

I learned about some html editors - I love 1stPage2000, The instructional HELP file is just right for me. I suspect, that as my site grows I will be using HomeSite1.2 more, because of its extended search and replace capabilities (will do a replacement to all occurrances of the specified string in all files within the directory.)

Now I have started an on-line course HTML101 provided by the ABOUT-WebDevelopment group. So far it has been way more basic than I need, but I'm hoping that it will get into areas that I want to learn. Again, the On-Line Forum is a key part of the learning opportunity. From there I just learned how to control whether a link gets opened in the current window or in a new "_blank" window. I used that to link the "site map" to my home page.

The most recent addition is a script that displays the date of the latest update of the page the code is:

<SCRIPT>
<!--
document.write
("Site last updated on " + document.lastModified);
// -->
</SCRIPT>

So that brings it up-to-date. In the future, I hope to learn more about CSS, XML, DHTML, and the other "languages" available. Please, if any of you have suggestions for improving my web pages, please email me and let me know.

Click here to read about my experiences with web hosts.

Click here to read about my experiences with various Graphics Tools.

--- Phil