Specifics About This Site

Ok, where should I start? Hmmm... well, after possessing a website for nearly two years, it became obvious that certain areas of interest were beginning to overshadow others. Ground Zero (my old site) was originally layed out in hopes that all of the specific areas of interest would expand more-or-less equally. Alas, this turned out not to be the case. The CGI thing never really materialized, and neither did hopes of a career in website design. Plans for expansion of the Audio section were never really expected to begin with, and even the construction of my subwoofer enclosure for Sharkey didn't keep the section alive.

So here we are. This site will remain primarily dedicated to my 1963 EFI turbocharged VW Bug, Sharkey. Technical articles will also remain, and I hope to add more later. I'll probably refrain from duplicating some of the articles that are already out there on the web, since that would defeat the whole purpose of hyperlinks and the internet in general. A list of over four dozen technical posts that I have made to the VintagVW mailing list were added on October 13, 2000 and will continue to slowly grow over time.

This site has been tested using both Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Netscape Navigator 6.01. It has not been tested with any of the new "beta" browsers, and you should report any problems with this site to the browser manufacturer, not me. I'd appreciate any input from users or Mosaic or AOL.

As of November 18, 1999, this site is now 100% Volkswagen related (not counting my non-VW related links page). @home still only provides its customers with 5 MB of web storage space so I decided to trim everything that wasn't VW related to make room for future articles, pictures, etc.

Besides the obvious focal shift regarding content, visitors will immediately notice the modest (I hope) use of tasteful (I hope) Java applets and JavaScript. No Dynamic HTML or CSS yet— too many web surfers are still using outdated browsers. I've also been playing around with Photoshop.

Using Photoshop

The first thing you'll notice (if you entered the site via my route URL) is an image of Sharkey modified with Adobe Photoshop. A photograph was first scanned in and used as a basis. I then copied the layer and applied the find edges filter to create the hand-drawn look. I later desaturated this new layer to get rid of all the colour, adjusted the contrast and brightness a bit, and then blended the two images together using gradient masks. Actually, it had been so long since I had used masks in the past that at first I simply faded both layers into white (with the original photograph faded to the left while the "hand-drawn" layer faded to the right). I then applied the "hand-drawn" layer overtop of the main image using the darken layer option. This option essentually compares the two overlapping pixels at each point and discards the lighter one, thereby darkening the original faded white half of the original photograph using the much darker pixels of the "hand-drawn" layer. I later compared the two methods and discarded the mask version.

Using Java Applets

The next thing you'll notice is the funky fading text on the entrance page. This was provided by a tiny (4K) Java applet called "fadeRedLight". There are other applets out there that can handle multiple fonts, more than two pieces of text, or use colours other than red, but this was perfect for me and less than half as big as the others. It also seems to provide a more "anti-aliased" look to the text. It is available from numerous internet sites, including The Java Boutique.

You will find two more applets greeting you upon entering the main site, although they will appear invisible at first. The most noticable is the navigation links at the very top of the window, used to move from page to page (called "apPopupMenu"). It is a simple applet that can handle numerous menu items and submenu items, and it will work across frames (ie: the applet can be contained in one frame but the submenu boxes will straddle into neighbouring frames when displayed, unlike some others that will be sheared off at the frame boundary). This applet is available from Apycom Software.

The second one is featured in the Sharkey's Garage logo at the top of the page, which creates ripples in the text as you click or move the cursor over it. This one is purely for show, but it's kinda neat. It is called "PoolMenu" and can be found using a simple Google search.

Using JavaScript

No page should be without JavaScript. Well, not really, but it can help you out in quite a few ways. The "Last Updated" date information is handled automatically whenever I upload a page containing the script (the page with the hits counter that greets you when you first arrive is a good example). This script takes the stored date the file was uploaded to work, so whenever you upload the file, the date is stored with it.