The whole thing is taking up 7 GB of hard drive space most of which is identical copies of files that haven’t changed between revisions. This was fine up to a point, but I now have 78,000 files in 35,000 folders and 150 zipped revisions. I did have a version control system, it just wasn’t very good: I just kept increasing the revision number at regular intervals and backing every-thing up each time I did so. It wasn’t exactly a break I hadn’t been taking my version control seriously and things were getting a bit out of hand. Ok, if you’ve been following this, there has been a bit of hiatus in my usual lack of progress - I took a bit of a break. I also had the ludicrous idea that I might make some money out of it, at least enough to cover its running costs - so when you’ve stopped laughing take a look at how to pay for it. I planed the website to be, in effect, an online book I wanted it to be simple, unobtrusive and nice to look at. So it occurred to me while doing all this, that the website template might, in itself, be useful to others and so I decided that the first publication should be this website as a template with information about it and the instructions needed to use it. There is a lot of stuff out there to help - jQuery plugins that you can use for all of this, JavaScript that you can use for everything else - but then you have to figure out how it all works - and I did, and it took ages. In short what I really wanted was Word on the web. So I swore at the dogs, frightened the children, apologised to my wife and I battled my way through, I built a website and then I wanted to add things, I wanted to display code fragments, I wanted formulae, I wanted tables ( don’t get me started on tables). Hmm, they might be right, I don’t know - it all just feels a bit unfinished to me. “ Hang on, you silly man” they’ll say (or words to that effect) “ these are mark-up languages and style sheets not programming languages you’re not being fair” Right, so the purists out there will be venting their outrage and my inbox will be full of vitriol: HTML 5 and CSS 3 are fiddly and awkward you will have to type the same thing in over and over again (colour values, margins, padding), there is no such thing as a variable or constant or even the equivalent of a #define statement - and for those of you on this side of the Atlantic, they misspell colour and centre. I’m not a web developer, but I have spent 30 years writing software for industrial control systems and I know my way around programming languages and software control, so I thought HTML 5 and CSS 3 would be more of the same - they’re not, they’re way off. Unfortunately, the web doesn’t have a user guide - it has thousands of them - not to mention all those people who have an opinion and all the other people who have a contrary opinion. I wanted to make a template website that I could use and reuse as needed to create various web books. Now I’m an engineer, so I wanted to do this right - I wanted precision, method, replicability, revision numbers, libraries, prototypes, documentation, user guides - you know, engineering stuff. Well, it is and it isn’t two chimps with a keyboard can probably knock out a website - even the British Government has got one (ok, they’ve got a lot more than two chimps), so it easy - but to do it properly, to make it look good, to make it feel right, to make it work on all the different web browsers, well, that’s actually quite hard. It is still my intention to do this, and I’ve actually written a fair amount of documentation, the problem was the website, I didn’t have a website and I didn’t know how to make one - how hard can it be I thought, everyone and their dog has a website - must be easy. I originally intended to publish some obscure engineering texts in the form of a web based book that might have been useful to other engineers. Well, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be when I started.
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