Conception. With few exceptions, the site was built on the rails of the Union Pacific West Line, between Chicago and Geneva.  I have a long commute, and using the laptop to work on the web was a good use of my time.  I started in June 1998, shortly after receiving my laptop, by using Front Page Express, which comes with Windows 98.  I first posted a few trial pages to the free user page provided by my ISP, then decided to sign up for web hosting to lock down the URL, www.marktrainer.com, and to bump up the allowable site space from 5 MB to 50 MB.  I've made a few small hand tweaks to the code, and by Fall of '98 I had purchased the full Front Page package.  Using the FP98 navigation menu features involved a rewrite, but the payoff was worth it- the site was reorganized in early October '98 and is much easier to explore as a result. 

Over time, the site will take on a chronological cataloging of pages, so that visitors will begin by selecting a particular year off the main page, and then select a month within that year, to see the pictures taken that month.  I hope to eventually put all pictures taken with the digital camera online, as a self-documenting snapshot of the turn of this century.  Since no pages will ever be deleted, content will be constantly increasing.   Server space will be a non-issue in just a year or so, with storage capacities going through the 16 GB limit for one drive.

I had originally hoped to be able to post my Mandelbrot and MIDI works, which are both quite extensive.   These areas will be added at some point in the future, time willing. 

Software Used. I used Photoshop 4.0 to resize the pictures, Adobe ImageStyler Beta 1.0 to add shadows and borders to images, Snagit to capture screen snapshots, Olympus Camera software to pull the pictures off the camera, FTP to manage the server content, Front Page 98 to assemble the pages,  Internet Explorer 4.0 to inspect the pages in progress through a browser, ACDsee to flip through clipart and digital camera directories, and Explorer for local file management.  When I'm working on the web site, many of these programs are often found running at the same time.

Above is a snapshot of my laptop desktop, distorted using a photoshop wave filter.

Hardware Used.  The site was put together, and is managed by, a PII-266 MHZ Dell Inspiron 3200 notebook with 64 MB RAM and 4 GB HD.  An Olympus D-320L digital camera is used to save images to a 16 MB Smartmedia card.   For more information on this computer, and others I own, visit the Machines I've Used article in the Articles section.  The laptop's active matrix flat-panel display shows all pages with zero edge distortion, as opposed to traditional monitors which usually curve at the edges.  It's nice not being confined to the "computer desk" at home.  I can work on the PC at the library, kitchen table, from the basement, in the car, even laying in bed.   It's not for everyone, but for developers who eat, drink, and breathe on these machines you can't match the flexibility offered by today's new laptops. 

Display Considerations. The web site was designed to be viewed by Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher at a resolution of 1024 x 768 and with a color depth of 16 bits (65,536 colors) or better.  I have not seen how the pages look under Netscape Navigator- hopefully there are no problems.  800 x 600 seems OK, but at 640 x 480 the fonts do begin to look rather large and things quit lining up as they should.    Also, I've learned that most of the pages will not load on older machines that don't contain at least 4 MB of Video RAM.  The photographs in this site are quite large, and many pages push the limit.   If you have one of these old machines, it's time to upgrade because a PC poor on video capabilities is a boat anchor.

Download Speeds. At the current time, the web site consists of about 35 MB of content.  Assuming 56K download speeds, it would take hours to  download every single page found throughout the site.  I could use several compression tools at my disposal to make the pictures load a little faster- but at the cost of degrading the visual quality.  Since the site attempts to showcase the digital camera and my photography efforts, displaying grainy or slightly blurred images was out of the question.  Most pictures have been reduced in size though, if only to squeeze more pictures on a page.

Future Plans. I would like to eventually add clickable, full sized support for almost all thumbnail pictures, perhaps creating an ASP to automate this large task.  The fractal page will contain many downloadable win32 C programs I have written, as well as a fractal tutorial.  A journal for the entire year of 1982 may some day be entered for on-line viewing by the masses.  I eventually hope to convert the MIDI songs developed on the Amiga into a format suitable for posting to the web site.