January 2, 2018

Hand-coding web pages

I'm going to try to create a web page for each day. This is my 'This year I'm really going to do this' self-delusion for the new year.

I'm back to coding web pages in html as Tim Berners Lee and God intended. By Hand. In a Text Editor. A few hundred bytes, not hundreds of megabytes. This page is 2,447 characters. Total file size is less than 4 kilobytes. The speed and simplicity of the web has been traded for ease, speed and commerce.

I can't believe what's happened to the web since I started teaching about this in 1996. Like me, it's become fat and busy. Some pages are dozens of MB on the initial load and then hundreds of ads, animations, video. - - Yuck - - I'm writing this in Text Wrangler, uploading the pages using FileZilla. That's it. No other tools. It can be done.

I taught the first WWW and HTML classes for Sun Microsystems. In 4 hours I got people understanding the web and buildling web pages. Yes, a lot had changed. There's been a lot of amazing progress. But there's been some maddening compromises. To get back some of the satisfaction of those early days, I'm going to simplify.

More on my early days teaching about the web some other day. I don't want to start the year sounding like that grumpy old guy.

First 'Not Working Anymore' day

Usually my week begins by getting up at 5am to prepare for 8am, 9am, and 11 o'clock meetings. Today I got to sleep in. Not the kind of 'I better get up and gest caught up' rest I used to experience. Real sleep. I like this.

I finally got around to fixing the broken sprinkler, maintenance deferred because I could keep busy with work. No more excuses.

Luann and I took a trip to Costo. I undestand that's what retired people do, spend week days at Costco.

Photo of the day - House on 17 Mile Drive, 2001

Click on the picture to download the full size image

This is a picture from 2001. We're standing at the Cypress Point turnout, looking east across fan Shell beach to some of the homes along 17 mile drive. Since this photo was taken the home with the nice green lawn has been sold a couple of times. The current owners had to take up all the green lawn and the man-made fountain and stream that ran along side the property.