About
Hello and welcome to my web site deepford.co.uk, aka 100% Packet Loss.
FrontPage Saturday TV Toons Theme
14th July 2023I was recently playing with an old Windows ME machine, and inside Microsoft FrontPage 98 I rediscovered the theme Saturday TV Toons which I'm quite fond of: it reminds me of the early web when I was a kid. I spent some time re-drawing the buttons in Inkcape and I think they have come out reasonably well: these are the section buttons in the header above. The SVG format gives them crisp gradients rather then the dithered look of the originals, and are more scalable in this format too. That's not to say I don't like dithering, on the contrary, the dithered effects in the Windows Setup.bmp is still a favourite of mine.
I found the original TV Toons tile background a bit garish if I used it as my site's body background, so I have decided to kept the grey tile (that is one of the backgrounds from Risc OS if you are interested) and instead I have used the original memphis-geometric blue tile from the Microsoft TV Toons theme as just the heading and navigation background, set in a big-ass radius oval which I think fits the era. I plan to re-draw the tile and heading banner too, but I haven't got round to that yet. I think the heading oval may be a little bit out of place, maybe it's too colourful now, but I think its fine for now. Something I can tweak later maybe.
I still like my old grey-button navigation bar which I have screenshoted below. Let me know which you think is better.
![[Old Navigation Screenshot]](../img/screenshots/2023-07-15-OldNavigationBar.png)
My original grey navigation buttons.
![[FronPage TV Toons Theme Screenshot]](../img/screenshots/2023-07-15-MSTVToonsExample.png)
Example page from the Microsoft FrontPage Saturday TV Toons theme.
![[Old Navigation Screenshot]](../img/screenshots/2023-07-15-NewNavigationBar.png)
My new top-page navigation inspired by the TV Toons theme.
New site design for 2023
2nd January 2023
I have recently found renewed interest in updating my website, and with some time off work over Christmas I have quickly thrown this site together with the intention of finally getting some useful content published. I usually give up after creating the site design and never get around to the content bit, but this is more than the last placeholder page I had up, so I'll call this a win. Let's see what happens.
This particular incarnation has been knocked-up in Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 running under Wine on my FreeBSD desktop.
Viewable on any browser
I have tried to keep this incarnation of my site very simple, ensuring clean and valid XHTML, with no crazy CSS, and no JavaScript. The text and heading layout is inspired by traditional printed user guides. Line length is set to the recommend 33em for easy reading. A simple responsive design reduces the paragraph indent as the browser width is reduced, followed by removing the page margins, trying to keep that ideal 33em line length intact where possible.
It seems to work OK in Firefox; Chromium; Otter; and NetSurf web browsers, even with the CSS page style turned off, so looking good so far. I also added the meta viewport so it should render well on phones too.
No JavaScript!
One of my pet peeves is that many websites have bloated and superfluous JavaScript, often to simply render text articles. Worse still, many sites assume everyone has JavaScript enabled with no <noscript> or fall back and the site breaks entirely and you get blank pages or whatnot. The assumption that everyone has JavaScript is just annoying, especially when you just want to read an article and it won't render anything! Why? ARG! It's like going back in time when some sites insisted you visit them in Internet Explorer (obligatory link to Internet Explorer is EVIL!). Bonkers. I hope my website loads on your toaster just fine.
History
I've had some form of website since around 2002 when I was around 17 years old. I first had a free sub-domain http://nova.no-ip.biz from a dynamic DNS provider, which I recall pointed to our static IP address that our ISP Nildram gave us at the time. I think we got the static IP address for free. The site was originally hosted on an old PC at the family home, and later ran on a Compaq Proliant 1600 server I got off eBay. Around 2008 I had moved to a Dell PowerEdge 2400 (Dual 733Mhz Pentium 3 with a whole 2GB of RAM, whooo) with a virtulaised FreeBSD 6.2 webserver. I'm fortunate the family was very tolerant of all the equipment humming away in the back bedroom. Those were the days when electricity was cheap.
Eventually we lost the static IP when we moved ISPs. I think that is when I bought this domain name, and moved email hosting over to Google Apps and I then used Google Sites to have some basic web presence for free.
Hosting as of 2023
For this new site I considered running a new site at home on a tiny little thin client and leveraging the free Cloudflare service to do all the security and certificates ect. I was very close, but I'm getting to the point where I can't really be bothered maintaining a server for a site which I never really update.
I looked at lots of free static website offerings that are out there. All seem to be way too complicated and hook into version control systems. All I want is a web server with SFTP/FTP or somewhere where I can drop the html files and away you go.
The clincher was I have £150 worth of Azure credits free each month which go unused. This is provided by my MSDN Enterprise Subscription which I have from work to help me maintain some legacy systems which I wrote years ago; which for some reason work well enough to be still be used by people 10 years later. Winforms FTW! And whilst I hate all the new 'cloud' crap, the Azure Web App Service piad for service does give that traditional simple FTP access to a web server. It even does the SSL certificate stuff now too. Perfect. So, this site is now hosted in Azure. When I eventually lose the Azure credits, I may re-visit the thin client idea.
