About
This page serves to answer questions regarding the genesis, construction and purpose of
skrause.org. I welcome your feedback, and if you have further questions,
please contact me.
- What is skrause.org?
- Why the domain skrause.org?
- What happened to catalyst and Helicon?
- How is skrause.org organized?
- How was skrause.org made?
- A note on HTML
- What is skrause.org?
- skrause.org is several things, but in answer to this
question, it is a personal web site; it is not a commercial, educational, non-profit,
government, military, etc. site, so expect to find many of the things you would expect to
find on other personal home-pages, such as the requisite resume, personal information, list
of links, etc. It serves as the “personal site” for Steve Krause, Sean Krause,
and John S. Krause.
- skrause.org is an ongoing, growing, and changing
project; digital texts are not set down on paper, let alone in stone, and hence can undergo
numerous revisions with ease. The same is true of a whole site, compared to a single
issue/edition of a magazine or book; skrause.org is not meant
to be a static site.
- This site is an outlet for the author(s) to express ideas and attempt
to communicate with others. Such ideas may be expressed either to inform, inspire debate,
or merely to intrigue, or even just to entertain. Since the site is not static, the author
is interested in receiving feedback at all times.
- Why the domain skrause.org?
- krause.org, krause.com, krause.net, krause.nu, krause.info, krause.de,
and krause.us were all taken. I also considered stevekrause.org, stevenpkrause.org, and a
few other domains.
- skrause.org provides a space for all the “S” members of the
Krause family: Steve, Sean, and John S.
- What happened to catalyst and Helicon?
- catalyst, the previous version of this site, lasted for
several years. When I moved to a more permanent domain (rather than a university-hosted
directory), I chose to go with something related to my family, and something I could
continue to use years from now. It is primarily for that reason I chose to retire
catalyst and move on.
- Helicon, a previous version of this site, lasted over a year. Helicon
was based on HTML 3.2 and over-used <font> tags. My left-aligned menu
entries didn't always perform perfectly in Lynx. I wanted to remedy that.
- Certain sections of catalyst (and Helicon before) were getting
too large; I wanted to “redistribute” the load on my site a bit (e.g. more
“top level” topics).
- When I went from Helicon to catalyst, I liked the overall
layout, both of site and the pages, but I wanted to go even more “minimalist” in
the page design, which meant getting rid of the “Helicon” logo.
- The name “Helicon”, which had some meaning for me, really
said very little about my site and its purpose. The word itself was obscure.
- My site was at one time hosted primarily at GeoCities; since this
changed, and the name (Helicon) was picked so as to fit in with the “Athens”
neighborhood, it made sense to me to rename my site, and (while I was at it) perform a minor
face-lift regarding the page and site layout.
- A catalyst is “an agent that provokes or speeds significant change
or action”, and such was one of the goals of my site. The site was also a personal
catalyst, a way for the author to set ideas and plans into action.
- skrause.org is less about “me” (Steve) than was
catalyst.
- How is skrause.org organized?
- My goal is not to present the most “artistic” page layout or
to display my ability as a graphc designer. This site is meant as a flexible structure for
conveying content My favorite personal pages—the ones that draw me back and make me
think—are those that are easy to navigate and are full of content. For skrause.org
I have decided to worry less about presentation, and concern myself more with what I am presenting.
- I do not believe this site needs a long description of
“how” to get around the site; that should be clear from the main page, and if it
is not, then I have already failed. However, for those who are interested, I have decided
to post a brief description of how I put skrause.org together.
- There are several global pages, such as the home page, contact information, and the
site-wide disclaimer.
- Links to these global pages are available on each page by way of a
navigation bar at the top of the page.
- The overall design is hierarchical: much of the rest of the site
content is made available by way of self-contained “sections” on various
subjects, such as math, computers, drawing or writing.
- As far as possible, all sections and all pages within sections will
share a common layout.
- In addition to the various sections, there are a number of
semi-independent “sub-sites”; these sub-sites may not share the same layout as
the the rest of the site.
- How was skraus.org made?
- skrause.org was made "by hand" using: emacs, vi and, nano under
Linux.
- Photos were scanned in with a Umax
600P and an AGFA Snap-Scan Touch scanner, and edited with PaintShop
Pro (Windows), The Gimp (Linux), and/or ImageMagick (Linux/MacOSX).
- Other graphics were created and edited with PaintShop Pro and/or The
Gimp.
- This site was tested on Lynx, Netscape Navigator, and mozilla.
- When possible, pages where put together using a standard template file,
common Server Side Includes (SSI), and a common Cascading Style Sheet file, so as to give
the whole site a consistent look and feel.
- A note on HTML
- I believe in the slogan “Best viewed with any browser” and
“K.I.S.S.” HTML is a markup language, not a page-layout languge, and I have
attempted to structure my content in a logical (rather than “physical”) manner.
I will not make my site browser specific and use browser specific tags. The
site uses HTML 4.0, but should be viewable with most browsers.
- I use CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, on this site. CSS are not
supported at all by really old browsers, and are not supported well by many
recent browsers. I use CSS only to set font sizes, types, and colors: older browsers ignore
these style declarations.
- I want people to be able to view this site, regardless of the type/speed
of internet connection they have (modem, cable/dsl, T1, etc.). Therefore, I have tried to
keep my use of graphics minimal, except where appropriate, such as on pages of photographs
and drawings. I do not use a graphical logo or background image in most of my sections.
- The Netscape 4.x series of browsers has broken CSS support, and
difficulties with numerous character entities that are part of the HTML 4.0 (and above)
standard. In particular, this includes m-dashes and left/right double quotes. I keep my use
of such characters to a minimum, but if you are using a Netscape 4.x browser, you may notice
a few “issues.”
- I validate my HTML (but not my English!). However, sometimes errors
slip in. In addition, there are different HTML standards; I have designed this site to
validate under HTML 4.0, but I use few features (only CSS) specific to HTML 4.0, so my pages
should display well on older browsers. If you experience difficulty viewing any of my
pages, please contact me.
- Feel free to check my HTML if you think there is something wrong with
it. I code all my HTML by hand, and have tried to make it relatively easy to read by way of
indentation (when feasible).