Ok, it's probably just a design issue and not that you've had a lot more snow in Howdenvale, but the page I get is almost totally white, with a big totally white block of Macromedia Flash animated whiteness right in the middle :)

Might I suggest looking at some incremental publishing software such as WordPress.org, ideal for exactly the sort of unfolding journal you have in mind, and it's been my experience that if your technology gets in the way of your telling your story, ie if you have to fiddle with flash and HTML just to say something, well, the story just don't get told, it gets put off and forgotten, lost among the other cobwebs -- I for one would love to know what's going down up the peninsula over Howdenvale way!

I notice you're also getting dinged to advertise Yahoo at the bottom in a frames arrangement that's going to frustrate the search crawlers -- if you are looking for free hosting, you might want to look at the blogger.com site where you'd still get dinged to carry some ads to pay the hosting, but at least it's google ads relevent to your content and a service to your readers.

For 99% of all web projects, I advise against trying to re-invent the wheel yourself -- software (and even HTML is really a typesetting software scripting program) is always tedious and the rewards can be disappointing if you go it totally alone. Using free software, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to participate with many others all with the same itch to scratch, and your combined efforts can rival websites costing millions of dollars, for a tiny fraction of the effort.

Just a thought :) ... the important part is just that you go ahead and do it ... and keep us posted on your progress of course ;)

Gee, I'm so sorry to hear you find our little website so dull and unengaging. I suppose it just goes to show you can't please everyone. I know I can't speak for all 160 of the active subscribers here on the SBP, but I'll miss you.

And just kind-a by the way ...

"I haven't visited this particular site since my original post."

... does that mean you just popped in to post an advert for your own work with no actual intention of community participation? I'm just wondering. No matter, byegones.

FWIW, should it matter, this SBP thing isn't anyone's 'skill-set', and the only thing I sell is sports stats -- I gave up long ago trying to explain useful interaction design; as the saying goes, "You can always tell a Marine ...".

This SBP thing here is neither showcase or anybody's biz venture, it's just a community authored barn-raised thing, here 'cause we needed it, all volunteer, 100% stone-soup'd together for nobody but ourselves -- mind you, if anyone should, like say, see fit to submit new snazzy CSS, hey, we're never too proud to welcome more chefs, and this brew can always use some bitchin' spicers!

Anyway, best of luck with the flash site. I'll bet it's beautiful.

Hi Gary. I just erased a page full of sarcasm. It's too bad too, cause I do sarcasm really well.

Hey! You edited your earlier reply to my reply. Just post with your gut.  I can see you there now. The light in the corner of your mom's basement flickers...your lip curls in defiance. "There.." you grunt as your fingers claw at the keyboard. "Now I've got you." A  growl rises in  your throat as you jab at the Post button..."No Wait!" I forgot to tell you how altruistic I am."....Your eyes gleam in the darkness as you spot the Edit key....

I"M KIDDING....

In any case, you do have a nice resource here, very informative. My comments were not really aimed at your site or your 160 users...they were aimed at you. I found your post rude, but you probably didn't intend to be, seems to be an IT pitfall.

On a kinder, gentler note, I'm very surprised you would have any difficulty viewing my site. I think the biggest file is probably 200k give or take. As I mentioned most of my dial up users have no problems. It DLs fine on my G4, XP and 2000 test machines. The new site should be online by the end of the week. Should alleviate your problem, but I think you're just impatient.  

By the way, I'm all about reinventing the wheel.. How else are you going to get a better wheel?

Laurie R.P.N

Ithink it is great that this site can let people express their opinion and

constructed critism. I appreciate this site is run by volunteers.

It would be great if we could get more people involved in the chats.

Howdenvale webmaster do you have any freebies to spice up this site.?

People seem so shy to log on. Either they dont care. or cant bother to log in. Do you post rules on the use of this web site."/

I am new to this and it is great to see what the locals are interested in.

Unsolicited opinions  great.  How else can we find out what is on the mind of our

neighbours. As someone once told me " a stranger is a friend you havent met yet."

Since  80 percent of the locals are seniors I guess they  are not interested in flash. the webmaster does have a point  if we want to attract the teens and twenties we may need something more.

My dad is 72 and only replys to emails by  clicking reply.Most of us have to use phone line sympatico. boy I miss my cable. Laurie

Hi Laurie;

Constructive criticism's fine, but there are ways of putting things that don't make you sound so much like you think you are the only one on the peninsula with a background in web design.

 I tend to go a bit heavy on the multi media side when I'm doing something for fun. Howdenvale.com is a good place for me to try things out when the mood strikes. In any case, I've been getting a lot of email, so I've brought in some assistance, you'll see something really cool soon, I hope, and I'll try to make it a bit more efficient for dial up.

I've done interface design for a few e-learning systems for seniors, so I have to beg to differ with you on that...I've also taught basic Windows to seniors and they pick it up just as well as my regular students if they are motivated...and they tend to have a better sense of humor.

Freebies? Well, I don't imagine Gary's too open to my contributions. In any case, at the moment I have Howdenvale.com to get online, and a couple of other similar projects...stay tuned...and I have a day job. If you're local to the area, drop me a note at howdenvale@hotmail.com so I can let you know when the new site is up. I'd like to see how efficient it is for you. As I said, non of my dial up users have any trouble...

I'm hoping to have 360 degree virtual tours online soon, seniors dig that...

Oh, by the way, I started life as an RPN....

No problem. I love a good row now and then.

As for the contributions, yes, I'm old-school and while the percents of seniors here is closer to 40%, that still means basic predictable set-and-setting design rules (because Boomers are another big percent). I also aim at cross-browser compatibility as much as can be expected with a free-contribution site and my hatred of the dominant browser's vendor ;) -- counting among my professional close-encounters the likes of Buxton (ex of Xerox PARC), Vicente (The Human Factor), Alan Cooper and Jared Spool, I'm not against Flash per-se for what it does, but it's pretty clear that I'm not a big fan of technology for technology's sake; I eschew glamour and glitz in favour of being of simple service, with a layout viewers know and expect, open to all, gracefully useful from the finest P6 wide-screen to the lowliest no-graphics PC (even cellphones use this site). I'm not here to show-off a talent for sale (who'd buy it?) I'm just conducting a small experiment in small-community collaborative journalism and a way to beat the off-season blues.

And the logs tell me there's not many who speak publically here on the SBP, which is typical for all public fora, but there are always at least 10 simultaneous lurking visitors active at any given time (22 now as I write this), and I hear through the skuttlebut round the lodge that the private messaging is, quote, essential. That's all I need to know.

That said, there are undoubtedly very definate problems with the useability and the CSS, and I just don't have the time or talent to solve. I'm still wrestling with why forums attract more activity than blogs, about what people would want to record in their own online journal, about leveraging the RSS factor (these are more in my professional sphere), but also the mundate bit-twiddles like how to bend the geek-code into people-speak, and issues outside my scope like how textareas can vary in width to the central column without things getting overlayed and hidden behind over other things when the screen res drops below 800; that's more CSS than I care to know, really, but it sure would be nice if some hip l33t design cowgirl could snapshot the ViewSource and twiddle us a make-over Stylesheet, then send me the patch.

And any rumours about my being a nice guy are greatly exaggerated.

Couple of things.

1. Whats the best browser in your opinion Gary?
2. Is it just me, or is there a horrendous amount of spyware around?? I have been a long time mac user, and my recent addition of an XP machine has me spending a ton of time cleaning trojans and other assorted crud off my machine.
3. If you have quicktime installed, have a look at:

http://home.cogeco.ca/~dclarke3/gov2.html

Kind of a fun way to visit howdenvale.

Well, to answer the questions, without writing another book about it, is the answer most often appropriate for nearly all technology questions of preference: "it depends ..."

1. The best browser is the one that works. If you want to measure by market-share popularity, then by far the best, by several orders of magnitude in fact, is the standard browser as used by Nokia cellphones. It's a sad testament to the arrogance of the US-ians not hip to this numerical fact that conversely it is that same most-popular browser that is least supported by most websites.

   That said, for my own general use, the browser I use most often is a simple text-stream thing called w3m; this eliminates all the junk giving me just the text content of the page, no eye-candy, no booth-babes, no horrific typography born of a generation who believe "fonts" were invented by Microsoft Word. For the general 99% case, all I want is the text, and when I just get the text, I can quickly cut/paste or whatever I want to make use of, note, cite or re-broadcast what I find and I'm happy. Minimum fuss, it works.

   For those rare sites where this method fails, I use Mozilla since it is the most standards-compliant browser and also includes all the features I need for essential things like the way I exported this TEXTAREA into an external text editor that is aware of and assists writing in HTML. You'd think MSIE would integrate MsWORD into the browser, but no ...

   There are still other situations where I need to use other browsers, even situations where I must use telnet HOST 80 but that's really getting fringe ;) In actual daily practice, I'm basically a lazy guy who already knows that for any given site online there are twelve thousand just like it, so it pains me to confess it, but if my method-one fails, I generally say "Fug it" and move on to the next link in the Google results, and almost certainly do this when method-two fails. In this way, it's not really the browser that's the important feature, for me it's the server-side design that makes or breaks the surfing experience. If it don't work the obvious way, then it had better be really compelling content or I'll just move on.

2. Trojans? Assuming you don't mean the latex kind, I'm afraid I can't help you there. Never had one, wouldn't know what to do with one.

   Keep in mind that your O/S is designed to carry subversive code to stealthfully infect your system, and the first authors to exploit that 'feature' was in fact the authors of your operating system. That feature serves them very well, they in fact need that feature to retain their control over your computer. To rub salt in your wounds, they then charge over the hill in cardboard armour announce that they have The Answer to this problem they created, and will share that answer with you ... for a fee.

   I've never understood this about computer users. If your auto-dealer did this too you, you'd sue them. There'd be class action suits everywhere. But instead, their users defend them, praise them, and shower them with riches. Go figure. I think it must have something to do with the same principle by which abused children very often strongly defend their abusers. Or maybe it's the Stockholm Syndrome ...

3. You're not telling the whole story. It is not sufficient to have QT installed, but your use of the non-standard OBJECT tag excludes my viewing it on not just one, but all three of my browser criteria.

   Can you post a simple link directly to the QT file?

Gawd..LOL. Do you ever go to a movie?? Or just read the book?

Sorry Gary.. I only designed it for most of the planet.

Anyway, works on IE, Safari, Netscape and Firefox. Good enough for me. But you can just replace the .htm with .mov if you want to look at the movie directily.

Gary, w3m is indeed a good tool( w3m.sourceforge.net) Lynx is also, its great for testing webpage criteria that is compatible with all browsers rather than having to download them all.It also shows how people who rely on voice(a growing segment) and how their program will see and translate your code.A great online LYNX test is at http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html. In fact you can test all browser criteria there(http://www.delorie.com/web/).I like to follow the old teacher, Vincents rules at www.webpagesthatsuck.com .

"Advances are made by answering questions.
Discoveries are made by questioning answers."

I do lament that I've not yet figured out how to make SBP truly compliant to those majority market-share mobile devices, but I suppose I have some time before North Americans really click to the mo-web. I do have a stylesheet for mobile, and you can select it in your options if you want to try it out, but the thing is, you can't get it until you login, and you can't login until you get it. Got it? Someday I'll figure out that device-predicates in the CSS and we'll be oh so modern, we'll be practically Japanese.

There is, however, just for the record, another more sinister reason for building W3C compliant websites should I care about such things (which I did once, but I got better): Scope who, without trying scores number second in a thousand on Google juice for Howdenvale

... or even howdendale.com ...