This document describes some of the features of my web site.
The centerpiece of the homepage is based on a somewhat complex table (check it's structure). It uses some animated GIFs with links to Australian sites, plus it has an animated image map with the main menu. The main menu is also represented as a side bar on the right, with additional information about each menu item becoming visible as the cursor passes over.
JavaScript was used for all the "mouseover" effects.
The code is executed only on browsers that can interpret it, so
that other JavaScript-capable browsers do not report errors. The
homepage is quite functional when using a non-graphic browser.
The ideas for the table structure and "mouseover"
effects were taken from
This site is not based on impressive graphic art work, although some graphics have been used to enhance appearance and usability. The "sliced-pie" menu was created in Paint and animated using GIF Construction Set. The graphical buttons were created with Paint and saved in GIF format with Microsoft Photo Editor. Microsoft Photo Editor was also ued to crop and size some images. I have created a site map using Word Draw to create the image and SmartDraw to save the output in GIF format. This provides a graphical view and convenient graphical navigation of my site. (or most of it - the second half of the menu tree has not been done yet!)
Tables are very handy for formatting all sorts of things. I have used them for my Guest Book form, for my homepage menu, for the Administrative Computing Committee Minutes, and as dynamic and static tables of data, such as the MIS Conference Reports.
Frames can be very frustrating when used improperly, and sometimes when they are used correctly. However, just to try them out, I have presented the Administrative Computing Committee Minutes in frames,with the meeting dates as a list of contents down the left.
I have implemented a Guest Book using a form,with Perl scripts to process the form and log details.
JavaScript is used on the homepage to determine the browser name and version, and to perform the "mouseover" efects where the browser is capable. Internet Explorer 3 reports an error if the code is executed, so this effect is disabled for that browser.
The home page has a client-side counter that also keeps a brief log of who visits when and from where. A bit map is composed to display the count. I should enhance the code to display the count as text for text-based browsers. In its original form, this script used to increment the counter every time the homepage was loaded. This included simply doing a reload of the page. I enhanced the script so that now it does not increment the counter if the same IP address loaded the page within the last 15 minutes. Check the counter source. A weakness of this counter,apart from the graphic-only display, is that it only records hits on the home page, not on any of the pages below the home page.
I borrowed the basics of this guest book from another site, and improved the layout by displaying the form in a table. I also experimented with ways of preserving some kind of formatting in the comments that people leave. One option was to allow people to write HTML into their comments, such a <BR> to force a line break, etc. In the end, I retained the code that strips out any HTML tags, and added some code to add <BR> where the visitor had pressed return. This means that when comments are reviewed, as an HTML log, the line breaks occur when the user placed them.
I have written several scripts that access an msql database. The scripts are written in Perl, and output HTML code to format the data into tables. A password is needed to access these pages. I eventually want to add update access capability to this database, to allow each of the colleges to update their own details.
I searched extensively for a personal search engine to run on my local machine, and would love to have purchased Inktomi's engine, only the price was too high. I settled on a package called mnoGoSearch.
I created this using Microsoft Access and Visual Basic.