About the Site

Web Standards

In 2002 I reworked the site into compliance with the current web coding standards, XHTML 1.1 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 2.

This represents the best practice in keeping the site accessible to the most visitors—no matter whether they’re using a standard web browser, speaking or Braille browsers for the blind, a PDA or web-enabled cell phone, or any variety of “non-traditional” browser.

Sacrificed on the altar of future compatibility are what I refer to as “20th century browsers” or what you might know as Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 4 and other relics of the past. And it’s not because I have a bug up my butt about any of them.

The browser wars are over, kids. And it’s we computer users and web designers who won. Gone are the days when we could only use certain browsers on certain sites because they implemented features differently, or not at all.

“21st century browsers” changed all that because they all subscribe to the standards as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, an independent global standards-setting body.

As a result, whether you’re a Netscape, Opera or Internet Explorer fan, as long as you’re using a version 5.0 or higher of any of these products, Scenic Route looks and works the same.

You can independently verify that I’ve done my job of coding to standards by clicking on the W3C icons to the right. They launch the W3C’s validation process, sending the current page to be checked for compliance with the standards. Think of them as quality assurance tools.

I’ll eventually get around to recoding the entire site. For now, the pages that comply with the standards sport these icons, or other similar ones when I’ve written to other standards.

Want to know more? Visit the Web Standards Project.

Fonts

I’ve designed the site using Microsoft’s Verdana font. I’ve chosen it because I find it easier to read on-screen than many others. True, it’s very plain looking, but I find fancy fonts hard to read on-screen.

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This sentence uses most web browsers’ default font, Times New Roman, which is also the default font in Microsoft Word. You’ll notice that, even at the same font-size specification, it’s smaller too.

This sentence uses Arial, which some browsers will sometimes substitute for Verdana if it’s not on your system, but you’ll notice it’s narrower.

On the green signs and in certain headlines, I use Tahoma. It’s similar to Arial (above) but more closely matches the font used on highway signs in the US.

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If the fonts used in the above three paragraphs look the same as the fonts in rest of this page, I encourage you to update your computer with Microsoft’s free TrueType Core Fonts for the Web.

You can download all the Microsoft Fonts for the Web for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT directly from Microsoft’s site, or from mine (which is faster). It’s one big program file, (1.5MB). Just run it to install the fonts.

If you use a Macintosh, see Microsoft’s TrueType Core Fonts for the Web page. Your eyes will thank you.

These updated fonts include €, the symbol for the Euro, the new European currency. If you use Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0, you’ll also need the updated files from Microsoft’s Euro page, unless you’ve already installed the Y2K stuff.

This generation of the site uses Tahoma, another Microsoft True-Type Core Font for the Web on the highway signs. It’s freely available and “close enough for government work” to the font used on US traffic signs.

An older version of the site used traditional image-mapped sign graphics (as opposed to regular text over a background image) for the site navigation. The text on those signs used Blue Highway, a freeware font available from Larabie Fonts, that closely simulates the standard “Federal Highway Administration Series E Modified” used on traffic signs in the US.

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My Web Server

On February 1, 2004 I treated myself to a new web server. I have a 2.4 GHz Pentium server with a half-gig or RAM and a 40 gig hard disk in a rack in a data center in Manhattan, running Red Hat Linux 9 and Plesk 7.

And I get to share it with my friends and clients. See my business web site, The Secret Labs where personal web site hosting starts at only $50/year (equivalent to $4.17/mo.) Be sure to check out all the extras I include at no extra charge.

My Rig

In late 2001 I built my current PC, Wretched Excess, using an ABIT KG7-RAID motherboard, an AMD Athlon™ XP 1800+ processor and 1 GB (that’s not a typo, there’s a whole gig) of RAM, made in the USA by Crucial.

Two-hundred forty GB of storage satisfies my desire for gobs of space and backup redundancy. Wretched Excess is stuffed with pair of 80 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X drives and a pair of 40 GB Seagate Barracuda IV drives. This lets me separate my data from Windows and my programs so that when Windows spits up, I can blow away that drive and rebuild it with complete impunity.

I use PowerQuest’s Drive Image 2002 to back-up the main drives to their twins without going through the hassle of making special boot disks to back-up across the LAN. A 256MB USB Flash Drive from USBKeyDrive.com completes my backup strategy and lets me keep my crucial files in my pocket everywhere I go.

Due to reliability issues with the pair of 80 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X drives and with the pair of 40 GB Seagate Barracuda IV drives I originally used in two RAID 0 arrays, I’m now using the motherboard’s RAID controller strictly as a second IDE controller. Additionally, I’ve moved two older, slower drives from my old PC so I can use PowerQuest’s Drive Image 2002 to back-up the main drives without going through the hassle of making special boot disks for Drive Image to back-up across the LAN. Did I mention I also back-up to CD-ROM, CD-RW and to another PC on our LAN?

<rant>
It’s only because of the massive redundancy afforded by six hard-drives totaling 310 GB and rigorously backing-up early and often that I’ve not lost a single byte of data due to what I believe is the inherent unreliability of contemporary hard-drives. If you don’t believe me, then why have all the major hard-drive manufacturers recently cut their warranties from three years to one? Could it be they were losing too much money fixing their crappy products under warranty? They clearly don’t have the same confidence in their current products as they did with their older ones.
</rant>

A pair of ViewSonic VG151 15" flat-panel LCD displays grace my desktop. They’re connected to an ATi Radeon™ VE dual-display graphics card. Windows sees the displays as a single 2048x768 desktop.

Closing out the hardware list, there’s an Asus 52x CD-ROM, Sony CRX230A 52x/24x/52x CD burner, SoundBlaster Audigy MP3+ sound card and a 3Com 3C-905C-TX-M network card.

Everything fits comfortably inside an Antec SX-1000 case with plenty of room to spare. A PC Power & Cooling “Silencer 400 ATX” power supply keeps everything lit and spinning while a 650VA Belkin UPS provides emergency backup power.

The CPU keeps its cool with an Alpha PAL8045T heatsink topped with a PC Power & Cooling “Silencer” 80mm cooling fan. Four more Silencer fans, (2 intake and 2 exhaust) keep the air moving through the case.

Finally, my PC runs Microsoft Windows XP Professional. The whole combo is the fastest, most stable, most reliable PC I’ve ever used. Two years later on, it’s still so wildly, wretchedly in excess of my needs that I expect to get another three or four years of daily service out of it.