 |
James R Maxlow |
| About This Website | |
|
James R Maxlow |
| About This Website | |
In September of 1995 I had been surfing the web for about six months in my school's computer labs... and I finally discovered that it would really be possible for me to have my own web page, hosted through school. So I played around with a test page, picking up HTML simply by examining pages from the net, seeing just how powerful the little tags could be. But that lost its appeal quickly, as I wondered just what I could create a page about that would actually be useful to anyone. One day I decided: I would make a fan page based around the Phantasy Star series of video games. In October 1995, the Phantasy Star Pages went online for the first time. I haven't given up HTML since.
Over the years that this site has evolved, the tools used to develop it have remained fairly constant. Forsaking all manner of commercial HTML editors, I continue to work almost exclusively with the Pico text editor on Unix machines and Wordpad on Windows machines. These two programs are fast, effective, and small... and force me to continually stay on top of proper HTML scripting. As for image work, Paint Shop Pro has never failed to supply everything I need. Some of the CGI scripts here were pulled from the Internet and heavily modified, though I've written the C++ CGI scripts myself. Some of the work had been done on Sun workstations in my school's computer labs, but up until late November, 2000, all of the work was done on a sweet little Pentium 200MMX (overclocked to 266) that I had at home, loaded with 96 megs of RAM and a cable modem. Unfortunately, the machine died a premature death, so I moved to an amazing-for-its-time Athlon Thunderbird 1.1 GHz machine with 256 MB of RAM that I built myself. That machine was gracefully retired, and I now split the website work between a custom-built Athlon64 machine and an IBM Thinkpad.
Moving this site to its own domain had been a goal of mine for nearly two years... but only recently had it become a necessity, as my computer accounts at Christopher Newport are no longer viable now that I have graduated. A bit after this move occured, I contracted an online friend to redesign the look of the PSPages section of the site. This resulted in a tremendous visual improvement, leaving my old design in the mid-90s where it belonged. The joy of these new beginnings is tempered by my continually dwindling free time with which to maintain the pages here, however; working full-time, trying to build a career, I am limited in the hours I can devote to the site each week. But I won't give it up, as it has become a part of my life that I would miss far too much if it were gone.