Want To Make A Website?
Offline I wouldn't even think of doing this if I wasn't absolutely amazed at how awesome my website host is. They give you 40 MB of free space. If you log into your account only once a month they don't put any adds on your site. I have had The Pathway Machine since July of 2009 and have never had an add on my site.
It is reliable, my site has never been down. If you need more space they give you 40 more MB for simply downloading a toolbar and then the toolbar gives you credits for every time you search something. With credits you can buy more space or bandwidth. In just about a week I had earned 100 credits and I hardly do searches on the web. They also give you 5 credits a day. With the hundred credits I had in the first week I bought 100 extra MB of space. With - like, I think it is 300 or 500 credits I can buy a GB of bandwidth.
All they ask is that you place a small logo at the bottom of each page, which they supply along with a small snippet of code. If you don't do that they have one automatically at the bottom of each page which looks like those Meebo tabs you might have seen, which I had for a while and isn't all that intrusive.
If you need more sophisticated hosting such as PHP, FTP, CGI, Rails etc. their paid services are very fair.
I highly recommend the HTML version rather than the sort of automated one where they provide the templates, but that is just me. Even if you don't know CSS or as I prefer, HTML, you have more control of it in that you can always just copy CSS codes if you don't like their templates and stuff, though theirs are nice as well.
So if you are thinking about making a website it is easy and great fun.
I hope this isn't considered as spam because I get nothing out of it. I just wanted to share it with anyone who is interested.
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I hate shameless plugging
Yeah, being a crabby bitch is a part of my charm as well but I think it may be our burden to bear. I have given up trying to change, and though some of it, I think, comes out more in posts and blogs than is an accurate reflection - there must be something to it.
Nice blog . . . NOW GET BUSY!
Well David, I will agree with you that everyone should know at least the basics of HTML. In the modern world, it should be viewed as an important enough skill that it should be taught in grade school, probably in between basic geometry and introductory algebra. Really, it is that important to living in an online world. That and VB code but if you can handle HTML, then VB code is a walk in the park.
I have done a bunch of websites for various projects over the years. None of them are current enough to be online or I could link some examples. Well, any of them may be mirrored in the wayback machine but that is more than I need to make the basic point.
Past that, not to ruin your unintentional commercial for your host but it really is not that big of a deal to set up a basic free website. You do not need download some tool bar and accept the company watermark on all of your pages.
Let me outline some basics:
Level 1 would be something like facebook.
You can't really do anything with such a deal beyond putting up your own thoughts and feelings. The pages will look as the site owner decides they shall look. OK, you don't need HTML for that but even so...
Level 2 would be setting up a site using one of the popular blogging services (blogger, wordpress, etc.).
Now you begin to be able to make your pages look somewhat different from the standards forced on the work by the great corporation mentality. Usually, they have a couple dozen templates to choose from and you just pick one. You will have a site up in under an hour and you can begin posting right away.
If it happens that you don't care for any of the standard templates, then you can google for sites that have free templates which you can upload. If you still are not really that happy, you can always try messing around with the code that makes up the templates and see what you can do. Once you have a couple of the free templates downloaded to your own machine, then you can look at the code, make a change and open it up in your web browser to see what comes of it.
Changing the provided images to your own is fairly trivial. Just put your custom image files in the correct folder in the template and change the file name in the code sheet. Changing the colors is also simple enough but the codes for RGB do take a bit of time to get a handle on. If you are only changing stuff in local folders though, that really is not such a big deal.
Once you are doing that, you are headed into:
Level 3 which is going to have you learning how to actually make a web page. Which really is not all that hard. If you want to do this in the simplest way possible, I would recommend that you download the browser “Sea Monkey”.
Don't be afraid of it being on your computer (really, downloading various toolbars is a much larger risk to your system). Sea Monkey is really a sibling to firefox and both are built on Mozilla, which itself is based on the old school Netscape Navigator. The code for all of them has been public for years.
Anyway, Sea Monkey has a feature that lets you build your own web pages in an environment little different from a word processor. You can type your words as you would like to, drag and drop your pictures from a folder and so on.
At this point, don't get caught up in trying to use all of the advanced features that are beginning to be available to you. Just pay attention to whatever message you are trying to communicate and presenting that in a way that your possible audience can get to as easily as possible.
Frames are a perfectly good way to meet your information needs. So if you run into someone who declares that they are a technology from the last century, pretty much ignore them.
CSS, well, that is certainly a useful tool. The biggest reason to start using that is to automate a bunch of maintenance tasks that are trivial but become time consuming once you have like 6-8 or more pages on your site. Make one change to the CSS template and it automatically dumps to your other pages.
Once you do start using CSS, there are other things that you can do with it but it really is best to wait until it becomes something that will help you rather than a way to make pages that tell your audience that you are impressed with all the cool things that you can do and are willing to let the actual information content slip.
Level 4 is where you are ready to move on to the real power tools part of page design.
Download a program called “Notepad++”. Not simply notepad that is already on every windows computer (although you can make perfectly good pages in regular notepad). You will need the better version as it has all manner of goodies.
It will check your codes for you as you type. Heck but it color codes your tags for you as you type so that you can see visually if there are errors before you save and check your work in a browser. It has features that help you to keep your work well organized.
Notepad++ is able to do all of this not only in HTML but is all of the major programming languages that are fully optional for the web. So if you decide to learn one or more of them (python, perl, PHP are just a few), then you already have a great tool for writing code in any of them.
Now, let me tell you some things that at least a noob page designer really should need to know:
Stay away from any software that makes your pages for you. These are really bad from the point of view of both trying to learn and trying to get a great end result. First off, you don't have any control over what code gets written for you. Generally, they will write a whole lot of code and they will do so in whatever way that the company that made the product says will be done.
There is no guarantee that the generated code will be what you want and you may end up with something that is different than what you were trying to do. When that happens, you will be at an extreme disadvantage as you likely will have no idea how to read the code that was made and even if you do, it is usually fairly buggy and inefficient.
I have seen too many web sites that have been done that way. When you need to check a code, it often turns out that the software made a few pages of code for something that could have been done in less than a dozen lines. It will likely be done in java, which is a language that is suitable for making real software in. You really need at least a couple of semesters of school to be able to handle that (or a couple of years of learning how to program on your own).
Never use java, flash or other technology to make visual animations on your pages. It really distracts from the information that you are trying to get out. That and it screams “Look what I can do” far more than even the people who use eight different fonts on a single page. It just requires more advanced tools. If you would not use eight fonts on one page, then why would you feel the need to use animations?
Do learn how to use FTP (file transfer protocol). At page design level 3, you may still be fine using the automated uploader that most hosts provide. By that time, you will likely be ready to use FTP anyway. Certainly, by the time that you get to level 4, you will really want to be doing FTP anyway.
If you only ever change one file every several days, then a web uploader is probably adequate. It will not be good though as you will have to mouse click to step through your folder tree to get to the place where the file needs to be. With FTP, you will have an interface that shows your work on your local computer on the left side and your work on the web host on the right side, both will the folder trees open to drag and drop from one side to the other. If you are making a fairly large change, then you can make all the changes locally and then drag and drop a whole segment of your folder tree in one action.
Do not get stuck on some special deal for hosting your site. My ISP (A&T) gives me 100MB for storage for free. They don't make a huge deal over how much data I transfer every month, although if it got to be quite a lot, they would be telling me about upgrading my service to a package where I could save money. Honestly, though, I have plenty of bandwidth for free and if I need more, that is about as complicated as picking the right cell phone plan for the airtime that I might use.
Also, do not get get stuck on some deal for what is presented as a really small price. It usually is going to be far more than you could be paying. Since web hosting is not a monopoly business model like cable TV is, there is no reason to be dealing with that type of predatory pricing.
In all honesty, the standard price for a web site is like $10 setup and that reserves your web address for three years, after which you have to renew it for another three years. Then you need only pay a very small fee for monthly service.
Right now, godaddy.com is charging $1.99/month for the first three months and $2.99/month after that. No tool bars required and no stupid watermarks on your pages.
Past that, if you keep at this, you may eventually reach the point of having a large and complicated site. When that happens, you will want to move to site management products such as Drupal (what the RRS uses) or Joomla.
Actually, that will put you back in the world of using templates for lots of stuff. However, you will really want them at this point because you will not want to be bothered with a lot of stuff for which templates are a great solution. However, you will also benefit by having quite a few more advanced tools such as the ability to use the admin control panel on your web host.
The admin control panel has too many features to list here but I will tell you about one. Let's say that you have a forum on your site and you hand out stars based on post count. With the admin CP, you can schedule a service in advance that checks all the users a few times a day to see if they have passed a certain point where the account needs to be updated. When that happens, the website will make the changes for you. Nothing for you to do once the feature has been set up.
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It sounds like you know what you are talking about, Chiam. Thanks for all of the info. I tried facebook for a little while and hated it. Absolutely hated it. I have the blogger thing going on as much as I have time for and was able to customize it to look pretty much like my website, the same with the yuku forums. Don't have the time to get any traffic in there though.
I do have a Java water applet on my home page and I like it even though I know it isn't exactly cool.
Shutup, that water thing is my favorite part of your site.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I hope you weren't serious. I took it down earlier today. I liked it but it was kind of screwed up. I know nothing about java so I just used someone Else's code and nowadays, it seems, you have to have it registered properly or it won't work. It always throws up a Java icon on my tool thingy, it kind of acts weird when you scroll up and down, it links to the shareware code, it interferes with my IE right click menu (A menu that pops up when IE users right click anywhere on my pages) and the fan on my PC always kicks on when I open up my Index page where it was on.
As much as I really do like the effect I found myself avoiding the page.
No, I wasn't kidding.
I've only been to your site twice though, and I wasn't able to find any articles either time, just lists of articles. There isn't any easy or persistent navigation, the layout isn't intuitive at all, the font is hard to read and the color scheme, while pretty, seems condusive to eye strain. Granted, I didn't spend much time, but I found it impossible to find anything to read in the time I spent.
Well, I found some lists of articles you had...collected, written, something.
With that in mind, wiggling my mouse around was the highlight.
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That didn't sound charitable, so I spent some time looking around just now. I see you've hidden some sort of navigation pane in a popup on the bottom of the screen, so that helped me find some articles. It isn't a standard web convention though so it is a barrier to reading your stuff. I think the original problem was you have lots of links that just point to blank pages. I just had bad luck in what I tried to browse to the first two times. Might be something you want to consider.
The font is just as bad as I thought, but mainly it is color scheme. I can read alright if I highlight the text. The brown on black headings are OK but the body is torture for me. Maybe I'm getting old.
Overall...well, you make a lot of assertions that run counter to 'normal' Biblical interpretations without much citation. This is all original research without the background data to prove your points. If someone doesn't already respect your authority in this stuff I'm not sure why they'd be too interested in wading through your articles.
My difficulty is that you write with the style of a blogger, but with the intention of a scholar. Obviously someone visits your page, since there are 14k hits, but I'm not sure who those people are or what their browsing pattern is once they land. Most hosts let you look at that stuff and see what actually happens when someone visits and that can be very illuminating. Now, that is only a problem if you want the site to be something other than a blog, and I know most Biblical errancy stuff is just opinion fluff anyway, so it isn't like you're unusual. Still, you disagree with big translation projects fairly often and you never really explain, "They say it is like this because of this, but I say it is like this because of this." Granted, that would be a lot more work.
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Keep in mind that is my opinion from a...I don't know, trying to look at it from the standpoint of a theist who might visit your site. To me it isn't relevant because I already know you have your own unique belief system based loosely on Jehovah's Witness stuff. I also know debating about it with you is fruitless, just like debating errancy and interpretation with anyone else is fruitless, which is why I'm not trying to comment on the content of your site.
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Get rid of the moving Gif with the face and the flying manta rays. Overall I like the aesthetic, although sometimes the page heading images look out of place and dated (mostly the digital stuff).
Have you thought about splitting the blog stuff away from the direct religious stuff?
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Is Elisha and the bears really one of your favorite kids stories in the Bible? How bloodthirsty of you!
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Just an example, and *I'm not trying to debate you, I'm just pointing something out to demonstrate my point using a case study! I don't give a shit about the issue or how you interpret it!*
http://thedaystar.webs.com/topics/condemnastrology.html
You say it is obvious Genesis 1:4 ...let them be for signs... is talking about seasons and such, but you don't even try to elaborate, you just say the Bible makes it clear astrology is pagan and bad, but...that's the point SAB was trying to make, the seeming contradiction. Why should anyone take your assertion as fact?
Same problem with Luke on the same page, you just argue via assertion that the language doesn't mean what it says and that any contemporary reader would have taken your view because that language pops up all the time. Again, assertion, no citation, no explanation, no debunking of alternate interpretations...at a minimum I (as a hypothetical theist) would want to see why the word was translated in a way that clearly means astrology in English, why that translation was wrong, and what supporting evidence you have for your translation being correct.
As it stands the whole thing boils down to, "No, the Bible isn't wrong, because it isn't!" said over and over. Granted, I only read...three articles, so it isn't a deep content study. Maybe I just had bad luck again. I know you can get deep into this shit and start going on about Hebrew this and Greek that, because you've done it here.
Remember, when you write this stuff you're not only writing to atheists, you're writing to the theistic Oxford scholars (or whomever) who came up with these translations in the first place. Dumb ignorant idiots didn't translate the major versions of the Bible.
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As a hypothetical atheist who clicked the SAB link to your site, I'd read that article, snort, and feel a little boost that the "Christian response" was just a naked assertion.
Just my two cents David. Again, don't take it as an attack, I'm honestly trying to be constructive. I'm even shooting myself in the foot, in a way, because if I said it all looked fantastic and made perfect sense I'd be sabotaging you by denying you honest criticism.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Okay, first of all I appreciate such an unusually thorough and well thought out attempt at criticism of my website. With only four exceptions, including yours, I have only ever had good things said about my site, from atheists as well as theists who disagree with me. The other three exceptions were similar to your points on navigation, writing style and visibility. For the visibility issue (dark on white vs. light on black) I have recently recreated my entire site in a black on white version. It is the same except for it is black text on white background and is mostly text only. Light Version of The Pathway Machine
I normally use a black background with light, though not white colored text because it looks better, in my opinion, not only for reading text but also with graphics and images. Having done research I know that most people favor a white background with black text. They think it looks more "professional." I think that is because they are accustomed to reading text on paper and don't realize that reading from a monitor is quite different. The problem for me is solved now as far as I'm concerned because I offer both.
One of the complaints I had was that portions of my site (the scrolling pages on credits like this one) just didn't work on a Mac, which for me was unfortunate but not crucial. I don't have or know anyone who has a Mac so I can't test that. By the way, I have tested my site on all the major browsers, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Fire Fox, Opera, Chrome and it seems like there were a couple others I can't recall, and except for a few minor details there wasn't any problems. I have also tested and allowed for or made adjustments according to various resolutions.
The other complaint of the four I had was the reader couldn't find anything - the navigation sucked. I realize that is a problem and I am trying to find a solution to it. When I started the first version of The Pathway Machine a few years back, in the 1990's in fact, most people were using Internet Explorer and relatively few people were using Netscape. Fire Fox hadn't been around for long, so the menu I used was a right click menu that only works on IE. The menu works really well for me so I have kept it for The Pathway Machine, but as a solution I give to address this problem is the menu at the bottom of the page you mention later in your post.
The navigation issue is my fault. I am trying to fix it but haven't had any success. The reasons for this are complicated and varied. I think people are idiots and when they "cruise" or "surf" the Internet they just float or hop about like shit flies. They may lite on your site for a minute and if everything don't look like every other place they have lit in the past they puke and maybe leave some maggots of criticism then move on to the next place with the attention span of a fruit fly. I'm trying to be nice about it. And remember I have only had four complaints. This is an observation from looking at how people react to other sites and that is how I see those people in my mind. When I go to a website I am not at all like that. I like exploring and finding things out, hidden things - and I like trying to figure out how they have it laid out. Like a good video game or a story or puzzle. I also started out on Webtv years ago and I think I got the sort of graphic but simple and oddly different design style from those old days. So the menus are sort of hidden and the credits pages like the one I linked to above are images which scroll to reveal the credits for each page. Believe it or not the earliest version of Earthling, a smaller version of The Pathway Machine, all content scrolled like that. Each page rather than just the credits. That was too impractical even for me. I loath the typical sidebar template with a thousand links. So I'm still looking for a suitable alternative which is more practical to the average web surfer.
Any self criticism I would have of my site would be that (navigation) and writing style.
The part about blank pages I don't understand. Normally I don't add a page until it is complete. All links to my site have been checked and rechecked by me and though I'm sure that there are some that go to pages that the link wasn't supposed to go to there is only ever 1 page (and its text only mirror) that is "blank" in that it is incomplete because I haven't started on it yet. Right now that would be What The Bible Says About Free Will and of course it's text only mirror.
Hmm. I doubt that you are getting old. I'm 44. The research I have done regarding this concludes that a dark background with a light, though not completely contrasting text is best for the eyes. The text I use isn't brown, it is a very light grey (#888888). I also use a bright orange (#cc6600) for unviewed links, and an occasional white for headings and subheadings.
The text shouldn't even appear brown to you, that could be a monitor or contrast issue.
The fourth criticism of my site comes from Steve Wells, the author of The Skeptic's Annotated Bible. He always links my stuff from the SAB but hates my writing style. He says that I need to keep it short and give the answer to the response at the very start. Actually good advice considering the aforementioned flies. You have to keep in mind those "articles" are simply a response to the skeptic's annotation of the KJV Bible. Annotations are not theological dissertations, they are brief asides.
I'm just this guy, you know? I consider "blogger" a different style than myself. More personal and considering what I am actually trying to archive blogger would be a compliment. Believe it or not, knave, I consider "scholar" an insult. A scholar, from my perspective in this specific case, is only someone who has been indoctrinated by the propaganda of the majority. A "Bible Scholar" for example, will tell you everything but the truth about the pagan unscriptural doctrine of hell. I'm not talking about education in general here, but in a very specific context. I don't want to get a thousand posts on how stupid I am for being against education. Public Education is a joke. Evolution in the schools, a joke. Biblical scholars for the most part, a joke. I don't have any doubts about my abilities as far as Bible study goes, and people who want a list of accepted scholars will have to stand in line only to be told by me to piss off because they are not going to listen to me anyway. Very few people will. The atheist will dismiss me simply for believing the Bible and they don't know anything. An impressive list of scholars that they also think are deluded idiots is hardly going to change that, and the theist all agree with the "impressive" and misinformed "scholars."
It is unusual that someone says my info is lacking citation. People will bitch at an odd bloke like me for name dropping, cherry picking etc. but not that. I often cite scholars who don't conform to the pagan transmogrification of Christendom.
I use site meter, like the SAB uses. It is pretty good about telling you that stuff. 14k since July of '09 is hardly impressive. I mean by most standards. I can't hardly believe that many people visit The Pathway Machine. I get about 20 to 30 a day. Some of those are me. I have set it so that it shouldn't count me by cookies, but it doesn't work. To set it so it doesn't count me by ISP throws it off so that I can't read the stats. Anyone can access the stats by clicking on the counter.
The SAB gets about 6,000 a day but we are alike in that about 95% of our visitors are there less than a second on only 1 page. Of course, the more visitors you have the more people are actually more attentive than a shit fly.
I have no use for blogs. I just took down my message boards and blog. Too much time for nothing. Debate and discussion of this sort is a thing of the past. A few atheists and far fewer theists keep it dragging along. Now that you mention it I will tell you what my website is. Something I very rarely tell in such detail. The Pathway Machine is an illustration. Note the heading on the Home Page. Deus Ex Machina [Latin] - God from the machine; a contrived device to resolve a situation. A literary device, you see?
A man from the German States before the revolution of the 1840's was a Turnverein, who, early in their history believed in the exercise of the mind as well as the body, but they went political. This proved problematic during the revolution so many fled to America only to fight in the American Revolution. During the 1800's his daughter died in the Tenements Of New York City giving childbirth. The father lost hope in politics and the kid wound up on The Orphan Trains where he was "adopted" by the missionary daughter and son in law of a wealthy merchant. He traveled with his parents and got to know the Maasai, increasing the disenchantment of the political / cultural and religious not unlike his grandfather. Over a hundred years later his descendant is a dieing man, an agnostic, who wants to know the truth and thinks mankind is incapable of doing this so he makes an android in his likeness to evaluate from a practical unemotional perspective that which he failed in. The Pathway Machine.
The site is really for me. Now most of my visitors come directly from one page of the SAB to its response on The Machine, though I do get really surprisingly good search results (sometimes better than the SAB page to which I am responding) but also results on Shintoism, Phineas Gage, and Sacred Texts Like the Kojiki, and Quran in the Library.
I bristle at the typical atheist response of the debate being fruitless even while at the same time agreeing with it up to a point. It is only fruitless because each of us has our paradigm. Not because it is impossible to get the truth.
That's what my sister said. Except she called them flying leeches. I'll tell you what I told her. Piss off, Steve Bennett is an artist! The dragons stay.
I have to disagree with you about the latter. Great attention to detail goes into the selection of those images.
I don't know what that means. Blog stuff?
I never said that. Actually it is Steve Wells' favorite part from a critical perspective I would imagine.
Heh, thanks for taking my post as I tried to write it.
The fact that the site is primarily for your own edification explains a lot, and it takes away most of my criticisms. Things like navigation, the 'blank' pages (they aren't really blank, they just look that way), etc. As you say, most people just want to come in, get their info and go out (shit flies). If you are trying to help them find useful information then you have to follow basic web 'standards' of navigation. If you aren't interested in that, then you don't. So no big deal as long as you know what you want and build the site to suit. The text color could certainly just be me. The "brown" links I was talking about where the unread links.
The fruitless stuff, well, let me put it this way. You claim some random thing and someone else claims some *other* random thing. Now, I could spend ten hours or so learning about all the different Hebrew nuances, the Greek translations for that particular word, then 'debate' it, but honestly who cares? I don't have a hobby interest in it and none of it is central to anyones belief anyway. My atheism doesn't rest on the Bible and your theism likely doesn't rest on the Bible and with that in mind I don't care what a particular theist thinks about a particular random passage unless I am unbelievably bored. I'm not usually that bored. So, fruitless.
Neat about the name though, I appreciate the depth.
My criticisms of the writing style stand though, but only because it is referenced from the SAB, but I followed up with that in greater detail in my follow-up post.
By, "Blog stuff" I mean all the stuff that shows up when you hover over the link at the bottom. Links to pictures of states, radio stations, tons of stuff. Again though, with the clarification of intent I don't have any problem with it. It isn't conducive to finding anything to an outsider, but the site isn't for an outsider so do whatever works for you.
The Elisha thing just looked like it was you, not him. Probably my reading comprehension score was low.
Dragons! I see it now, that makes a bit more sense, I couldn't see the wing separation before.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
You didn't mention testing it on the Apple Safari browser, which does have a version that can be installed on Windows.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
I think you may be looking at my overall intention as being "Christian," which I'm not. I can understand you not seeing my perspective because right now there is no storyline to the Machine, only sort of disjointed parts. But I'm not trying to give a "Christian Response" as such. In some cases, like this one that is especially true.
I think part of the problem with "skeptics" is that they see the Bible as too literally being just what they expect it to be. They take it at face value with little thought or research. The Bible says "signs" then it (signs) is taken by the atheists to mean superstitious "signs" as in omens, which would contrast with the obvious more practical use of the word "signs" being when the sun is going down it is an indication or "sign" that it is getting dark out. The same with seasons, as in winter. So the contradiction is in the misinformed eye of the beholder and any amount of research you can give to the skeptical mind is only going to piss them off even more - they dismiss it as logical or theological acrobatics and they get pissed because you seem to think you are more clever than they are.
Was it you that called me a theologian bully? Even rational thinking atheists don't like to be told that some thinking and research can go into something they really don't understand very well and in some cases, like this, there isn't any because it isn't necessary.
Now that you mention it that was one that I haven't been at all familiar with but did install and test The Pathway Machine with. Actually, it was, if I recall, a really cool one. It had a sort of favorites you could use as a homepage which amounted to an image caroselle with all your favorite pages in image form? I actually had most of my pages saved that way and was seriously considering keeping the browser to use for surfing. That has been a while and I had to take all those off my PC for space.
I don't remember calling you a bully, but I shoot my mouth off continuosly, so maybe.
Your response is fine, great, but I repeat: Why should a reader of your site believe you? Most of your readers coming from SAB are either going to be atheists or modern 'pagan' Christians. To me it seems like you should either write to your audience or not write at all.
Personally, I wouldn't care if you could show the Bible wasn't talking about omens in those passages, but maybe I'm atypical. But you've got the SAB on one side, and your defense on the other. To...I don't know, 95% of the people arriving at your page the SAB thing uses the language of the Bible in a way they understand to make a point. Convincing them that point is wrong takes more than you saying it is so.
Essentially, most people reading those passages will take, "Signs" to mean, "Omens". The ball is in your court if you want to prove otherwise, right? Isn't that the goal of the article?
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
The sun going down is not a 'sign' that it is getting dark, it is the reason it is getting dark. A 'sign' would refer to something that itself is an indicator that some event is about to happen, not the event itself, or its direct cause.
The most reliable indicator of seasons is the passage of the sun, including where it rises and sets, and how high it gets at noon.
The stars can be used, but more indirectly, and the particular stars at particular positions in the sky at standard seasonal points progressively shifts over longer periods of time.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
That's what I try to do. With believers, unbelievers and the Bible as well.
I think of it like the music business. Someone always has an idea about what you should do or how it is to be done but the good ones (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan) do it their own way and rise above the norm. Of course, [laughs] there are also those who, bless 'em, do it their own way and the result sucks. (Tool, Uriah Heep, The Beatles) but that can be a matter of personal taste.
I would like to do it my way but don't want to suck, of course. I need to compromise for practical purposes. I don't want to waste anyone time who visits the Pathway Machine, but I can't please all the people all the time. Your criticism was intended constructive and valid.
Those are orange. I think it might be your monitor. I recently got an awesome 24 inch monitor which makes the images I optimized look - well, not as good as they did on my old 17 inch monitor. It is an Asus with several different modes of view. Standard, Theater, Gaming, Scenery . . . I think all of them suck except the standard. It is what one is accustomed to, I suppose. Older monitors may make the Pathway Machine look really bright and in my opinion ugly as hell. Color and contrast is way off.
I agree up to an extent. Typically the uninformed will see claims as being random, but both atheists and theists that I have debated with who are more educated on the subject of the Bible, rather than religion or atheism in contrast to religion, won't see those claims or make claims that are random. The informed atheists that I have come across (there are two of them) had an interest in ancient history. They also had an interest in science but that is out of place in an informed discussion of a theological nature. Atheists who approach discussion of the Bible with science in mind are, in my opinion, not very good at it and seem incapable of grasping that it is an irrelevant angle in which to approach the subject.
I understand and respect that. I feel the same about science. But as you said, there is little point in criticizing my subject material if you are not at all interested in it.
Thanks. Not too cheesy or Roger Waterish?
I will be the first to admit my writing style is not that great. The one thing I regret about having not taken my public education seriously is that when I spent that time reading Frank Herbert and Douglas Adams instead of trying to get what they were telling me the result is that I am very nearly, if not completely, grammatically retarded. I don't regret having ignored science or math or history, but I wish I could write.
When I read my stuff the thing that bothers me is that from my perspective I know what I am saying mostly makes sense. The Bible stuff I mean, but to someone who don't know what I am getting at they are hard pressed to get it. Some of that is because of Wells' criticism and the fact that I am responding to annotation.
Well, yeah . . . I am working on the navigation so people from the SAB can move about from page to page for what they are looking for, but most people don't care anyway. I see now what you meant by blank pages. The images of states. Radio. You click on the image and get to listen to radio stations from that state. All of that stuff, videos, radio, archive, library, museum, is supplementary material for the illustration of The Pathway Machine. You see, while the android is looking for truth in the Bible he looks for other truths as well. Into humanity. I haven't decided which, but during this time either a global calamity like a meteor or a sort of scientific utopia happens and all of that stuff is the android's attempt at a sort of historical or secular museum. Radio and secular videos from the past, art, music as well as various religions and "sacred texts."
It is sort of a vehicle for a sort of electronic record of my own interests, like a theme album (Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, The Who, Even Kiss' The Elder) opus. To me it is an interesting comfort, not just a Fundy website.
I've been called cryptic. They are dragons. It reminds me of Revelation Chapter 12. The one with the face is called Dragon Sunset. It appears on the Dark Version and when clicked takes you to the Light Version. The counterpart is on the Light Version and when clicked takes you to the Dark Version. It is called Dragon Moonlight. Its all very hippie, I guess. Steve Bennett did them as well as the image on The Response To The SAB which is called Leaving Siwah.
Well, that is what we are here for.
Two sides to every coin.
Well . . . maybe. But maybe that just means that I'm serving. It takes two to play and from a theological perspective I would like to think that it is really in the court of the visiting player. In other words I don't expect anyone to believe me any more than they should believe the so called "scholars" who would disagree with me.
Lets take hell, for example, because it is so easy. If I were faced with the choice of a barely articulate young JW child and a respected scholar of Hebrew and Greek in the finest religious educational institution in the world I would choose the child. Is that because I agree with the child or because in the obvious case of hell the child happened to be correct on the subject according to the Bible? That is up to only me to decide, and for each seriously interested reader.
Isn't this "So the contradiction is in the misinformed eye of the beholder and any amount of research you can give to the skeptical mind is only going to piss them off even more - they dismiss it as logical or theological acrobatics and they get pissed because you seem to think you are more clever than they are." sort of the same thing as saying, 'fruitless'?
I understand, it just seems like if you aren't going to point your full theistic arsenal at a particular point, why bother to volunteer as a response to be linked from SAB? SAB makes whatever point they do, anyone coming to your site from SAB is looking for a rebuttal. I *know* you can get technical and deep enough to make the average atheist cross his eyes and the articles I saw didn't represent what I know you're capable of.
Anyway, cheers
(Btw: Spending time reading Douglas Adams and Frank Herbert is almost certainly more valuable than listening raptly to whatever drivel they were peddling at school.)
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I don't know if that is pedantic or you missed my point or I fucked the point up myself.
The sun and stars, doing whatever they happen to be doing at any given time, is a 'sign' or indicator that some event is about to happen. Especially to the primitive people whom the Bible is addressing.
To think, as skeptics such as at the SAB typically do, that this 'sign' is a superstitious omen rather than an indicator creates the incorrect - illusion if you will - of there being a contrast with the superstitious interpretation and other passages in the Bible condemning astrology which is the superstitious reading of these 'signs' in order to foretell events. When in fact there is no contradiction because that isn't how the word 'sign' is used in the context of seasons and tides etc.
Mellestad - Isn't this "So the contradiction is in the misinformed eye of the beholder and any amount of research you can give to the skeptical mind is only going to piss them off even more - they dismiss it as logical or theological acrobatics and they get pissed because you seem to think you are more clever than they are." sort of the same thing as saying, 'fruitless'?
Dave - Remember what I said, though? "I bristle at the typical atheist response of the debate being fruitless even while at the same time agreeing with it up to a point. It is only fruitless because each of us has our paradigm. Not because it is impossible to get the truth."
So yeah, as we know it it is fruitless, but it doesn't have to be. It shouldn't be. And too, carefully consider what you really mean by fruitless. What would you expect if not only that I wise up and think like you? The same applies to me. That is the only real problem, the only actual confrontation as far as I can tell. A contrast in world views. We need to get past that in order to see how much further we can take it, most likely to no stark conclusion of winning or loosing but of at least a better understanding.
Mellestad - I understand, it just seems like if you aren't going to point your full theistic arsenal at a particular point, why bother to volunteer as a response to be linked from SAB? SAB makes whatever point they do, anyone coming to your site from SAB is looking for a rebuttal. I *know* you can get technical and deep enough to make the average atheist cross his eyes and the articles I saw didn't represent what I know you're capable of.
Dave - Well, but sometimes that isn't necesarry. In cases like that it wouldn't matter anyway. If I can make the eyes of an atheist cross that is likely about as good as I can do, but that isn't necessarily accomplishing any more than soothing my own doubts through the ego, I could very well be wrong and what good would that do? It is fruitless in that sense but on the other hand well, hell, here is another shameless self promotion of material someone else wrote and cridited, I use. Ockham's Razor. And more Latin. Pluralitas non est ponenda sine meccesotate (Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily). I interpret that to mean, in a very basic sense, easy on the bullshit, even if the bullshit is scholarly ammunition, if it isn't needed leave it out.
Mellestad - (Btw: Spending time reading Douglas Adams and Frank Herbert is almost certainly more valuable than listening raptly to whatever drivel they were peddling at school.)
Dave - For the most part I agree, though not with the writing. I wish I could write like the Frank Herbert I read at that time.
Mellestad - Anyway, cheers
Dave - Yeah, cheers, mate.
Since advice for website development and design has already been given, I want to add some of my own and just elaborate on some of the earlier advice.
First, do not use the hosting provided by your ISP. They do not depend on the quality of their hosting service, so the quality usually sucks (I could not access David Henson's website, for example) and complaints about its suckage will fall on deaf ears. In addition, should the ISP drop you, they will drop your website too. By using a dedicated host, the quality will almost always be better and your website will remain online should your ISP drop you, at which point you could switch to another ISP rather quickly and resume working on your website.
Second, do not use the free application-specific hosting (such as wordpress.com) if you want a unique website design because that will almost certainly cost you an arm and a leg--the extra price here is how they are able to provide the free hosting for the basic stuff. You will also be prevented from adding new applications to your website. If these are concerns, even of the "maybe some day I'll want that" variety, then find a hosting service that lets you do whatever you want, such as www.aiso.net. I do not know if they provide an admin control panel, so you might want to look into that.
Third, always use CSS (in external stylesheets) for presentation and not HTML. As said before, if you make several HTML documents and then decide to change their presentation, this will be a piece of cake with CSS but a bunch of crap with HTML. This is even true of single HTML documents though. Keep your presentation stuff all in one place and away from the non-presentation stuff so it's easy to find and change. In addition, external stylesheets only need to be downloaded once to handle all the page views in a browsing session, but presentational HTML needs to be downloaded again and again and again. The only cases where using HTML for presentation makes sense are the cases that never come up in the real world. Only use HTML only for document structure and semantics. CSS is your friend.
Fourth and final, CMS's can be a godsend in the sense of both miracles and plagues. They enable rapid development, but almost all of them have limitations and some of them can be downright retarded sometimes. As mentioned before, RRS uses Drupal, and I want to give you a horror story about when we (me and several other people) were working on the current design.
One of the goals was to reduce the unwanted HTML and to consolidate the CSS better so there would be fewer HTTP requests. Some of the HTML was hardcoded into Drupal so there was no way to remove it without changing Drupal itself, which would ruin our ability to update Drupal easily at a later date. In addition, when I was done moving the CSS from one file into another, I went to delete the now-empty file and you know what happened? Drupal crashed. The RRS homepage, forums, profiles, everything crashed. Some bad software architecture decisions were made in the making of Drupal, and the requirement of certain CSS files was one of the most retarded ones--I mean Peter Griffin on Family Guy retarded here. It's so retarded one would never think it could happen outside cartoons. Ever since, I have wanted to see Drupal dead as though it were Lois and I were Stewie. Every time you visit this website, you are being slowed down having to fetch that completely empty, completely useless CSS file. Unforgivable!
Anyway, these are the kind of things that can crop up with CMS's that you can either foresee but most put up with or that you cannot foresee at all. I recommend staying away from Drupal. While I have tried a few CMS's, my knowledge of them is still rather slim, so I do not know, for example, whether Joomla's any good or not. If you want my recommendation: www.symphony-cms.com
I have been toying with Symphony for a few weeks and I am loving it. The learning curve is somewhat steep, but that is because you need to think within a new conceptual framework, not because the software is flawed. Indeed, the interface is minimalistic and downright elegant. You create data models for the data you want to work with, and it preps your database for it and creates the form to put data into the database. You can even have it fetch RSS and Atom feeds and even put that in your database, so you have the latest entries from your favorite blogs on your website, or the latest tweets from your Twitter account. You then create pages to fetch that data and Symphony will wrap it up in clean XML for you. You then create templates in the language XSLT, which is an official standard from the same people responsible for HTML and CSS. The XSLT can process the XML to produce anything text-based, such as HTML, CSS, XML, SVG, MathML, LaTeX, or something else entirely, or even a combination of those. There is no hard-coded HTML, no retarded CSS-file dependencies, or any other nonsense. The sky's the limit. Like I said, the learning curve is a bit steep, but if you are willing to learn a little for the sake of having a kick-butt CMS, then check out Symphony.
Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!
Visual_Paradox,
Allow me to second your assessment of Drupal, based on this web-site.
I am into web programming - AJAX, PHP, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, plus the necessary amount of HTML, so I do understand the nuts and bolts behind this stuff.
And learning all the ins and outs of that combination of languages and tools has been very steep - not for the ordinary blogger.
I am personally more into building up my own library of tools and files to build up a web-site. My current focus is on Apple's iOS, for implementation on iPad/iPhone, which does reduce the hassle of having to support a range of different browsers. But the clients are likely to want to have support for other smart-phone/tablet environments, so I have to structure my code to hopefully make that not too painful.
The other main point I wanted to mention that is relevant to this thread stems from a problem I ran into while helping a friend who was having some hassles setting up his own blog/web-site, was that different web-hosters lean to either Microsoft frameworks or the more open-source environment I am using. He had found a Blogging package that appealed to him, but it was based on the MySQL/PHP setup, and while the Web Hoster he had chosen did have support for both the M$ environment and the 'LAMP" version, there were holes in the LAMP version, standard PHP libraries not supported on their server, etc, and they didn't seem too interested in adding the relevant modules.
Something to keep in mind.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Learning the ins and outs of HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, and MySQL is too much for the average blogger. I agree. When I mentioned Wordpress, I was commenting on the hosting service, not the software they are hosting. Their blogging software is pretty darn good from an end-user viewpoint. Indeed, their writing analyzer (not just a spelling and grammar checker) surprised me. A person could roll their own blogging software I suppose, but they would likely never come up with something comparable to Wordpress. My advice to the average blogger is to use the Wordpress blogging software but not their hosting service because then they can have a custom design without costing an arm and a leg.
You were right to mention that some web servers are not configured with the libraries, modules, and software that you might require. I should have said as much myself because Symphony requires LibXML for PHP and Mod_Rewrite for Apache, both of which could pose problems in finding a suitable hosting provider. (Do not be dissuaded by this caveat though, dear readers. There are many hosts out there that meet the requirements.)
When it comes to building up a library of tools and files, I can certainly understand that, because most of the code out there sucks. For a rather ubiquitous example of sucky code, though not programming related, consider the many websites that wrap all the code inside the BODY element with a DIV 'container'. They seem to be unaware that desktop browsers treat the HTML and BODY elements as containers already. Check for yourself: give the HTML element a background color, the BODY element a different background color, and the BODY element a width of 50% and you will see both colors. In 99.99% of cases, a third container isn't needed. I say 99.99% because I'm not sure how handheld devices would react. (If you could shed some light on that matter for me, I would appreciate it.) I know that's a small thing, but there are thousands of small things in other peoples' code that, together, drive me up a tree. When I did web design and development regularly, I had my own library of tools and files, for precisely that reason. I suspect you feel the same, hence your own library.
Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!
About the DIV thing, I have copied a technique I found in a library some one suggested I look at to handle the interface, which actually loads what is effectively a whole bunch of 'pages' at once, each wrapped in a div element, and then uses a bit of CSS so that all except one are hidden.
Then all you do do go to another page is hide the current one and make the next one visible. You can include fancy transition effects, fade-out/fade-in, etc.
The advantage is it all downloads at once, so going from page to page has no downloading delay at all, makes it all feel very responsive.
Obviously if there is a lot of data on each page it may be less practical, but it works great on the iPhone, everyone is impressed with the speed.
I wasn't impressed with many other aspects of the library I found it in, so I didn't end up using it, apart from this idea.
I have thought about maybe using AJAX to download extra 'pages' in the background when the user moved into another topic area, deleting less-used div's if resources were tight.
I also take advantage of local and session data storage, which I think is part of HTML5, a nice interface to what is basically a 'cookie' mechanism, to save data across scripts and pages, and application caching, which can allow a web-app to run like a 'native' app in many ways, only needs to talk to the server for updates and accessing actual online info and any actual writing back home. Of course, these aspects require browser support.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
OK, since I kind of got this tech discussion going, I need to partake.
If you have a small web site that has a few pages, then CSS may be more than you need.
The advantage to CSS is that you can make one change to that file and it will echo all over the site as soon as the customer reloads. If you want each page to be different, then CSS is a problem.
If you have a somewhat larger web site with a few dozen pages, then CSS is your friend. One change happens everywhere at once.
If you have a web site with hundreds or thousands of pages, then a CMS is what you should look at.
I will still say that you should not look at companies that claim to be free. They are not free. At best, you can get some stupid logo on your site. At worst, you will be forced into a deal where you havce to pay a crap load of cash to do the same things that could have been done for free.
=
I don't understand - are you saying that due to some problems you are having you are not able to access my website, because my website has nothing to do with my ISP and you should have no problems accessing The Pathway Machine.
I pretty much agree with you about that, and early on I was using CSS because I didn't want to have to muck about with coding what I knew would quickly become hundreds of pages. I changed to HTML because I'm not as familiar with CSS - though it is, in my opinion easier to do and to learn and more efficient - I just didn't want to take the time to learn it and feel it is too constrictive to style. Since CSS is really just repetition of a single page as far as style goes all I did was create two or three page styles that I liked the look and 'feel' and make those into a template of sorts, so when I add a page I spend little time mucking about with HTML. The only thing I would add to the page after it's completion is a growing menu so I use CSS menus. When I add pages I only have to add them one time to the CSS menu. The pros of this is that I get the look I want without have to spend a great deal of time on coding, the con is that HTML takes up more space because each page has to have code rather than like CSS of course, being the exclusive source.
P.S. By the way, Mell, if you are reading this I have taken your advice and started implementing a new menu / navigation bar on all the pages that is more practical to visitors.
CSS is a concise way to organize a small number of styles across as many pages as you want, and change or just 'tweak' particular header or paragraph styles very easily, while keeping a consistent 'look' for your site. You don't want a mish-mash of many locally-defined styles across a lot of pages.
CSS also assists in a number of other things like dynamic programming in conjunction with Javascript, but that is probably too advanced for what you have in mind.
You still have HTML, with or without CSS, just that CSS allows you to avoid embedding all the style information in each HTLM element to which it applies.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Just update the thread if you want more input when you've made some progress.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
BobSpence,
When I talked about websites that wrap all the code inside the BODY element with a DIV element, I was not talking about uses of DIVs like the one you mentioned. I meant when someone writes <body><div> ... </div></body> as though it meant <body><body> ... </body></body>. That's what drives me up a tree. Hardly ever is there a need for code like that, so that kind of code is almost always needless bloat.
The local and session data storage was introduced by HTML5 and it is one of the few things in HTML5 that I have yet to play with, mainly because I have little use for such a thing. I am loving HTML5 though. As someone who prefers his markup to be semantically sound, the <section>, <header>, <footer>, <nav>, and <article> elements are big improvements. I also like that <h1>s can be used for the document itself and for any number of articles contained in the document is also a nice improvement because it is now possible to import articles without having to convert their <h1>s to something suitable for the structure of your own website. The shorter and simpler <!doctype html> and <meta charset=""> save bandwidth and they are easier to remember. (I used to keep a template around because I could not remember the longer versions of these tags in HTML4 and XHTML.)
Answers in Gene Simmons,
While being able to change the presentation of several HTML documents in one stroke is one of the advantages of CSS, it is not "the" advantage of CSS, just one of them. The biggest advantage is the separation of concerns. When changing the structure, semantics, or content of a document, presentation gets in the way and wastes your time, and when changing the presentation of a document, the structure, semantics, and content get in the way and waste your time. Keeping concerns separate helps you work faster.
Another big advantage is more granular control over caching. When the structure, semantics, or content of a document is changed, the user does not need to download the presentational stuff again. Likewise, when the presentation is changed, the user does not need to download the structure, semantics, and content again. Keeping concerns separate helps your visitors use your website faster.
It should also be mentioned that presentational HTML is deprecated and has been deprecated for years, which means that it is going the way of the dodo. As such, avoiding presentational HTML will improve the odds that the document will continue to work in future web browsers.
In my opinion, there is never a time when CSS is more than you need in the sense that presentational HTML can be a good solution sometimes. CSS is exactly what you need for any website that cannot rely on the default rendering of HTML elements.
David Henson,
It seems that Answers in Gene Simmons mentioned ISP hosting and that got blurred together in my mind with what you were saying about your web host. Sorry about that. Also, I can access your website now.
You said you have two or three styles or templates. Templates are a good way to approach things, saving much wear and tear on the keyboard. I just want to point out that CSS can be useful in this regard. In your documents, write the HTML tag like <html class='template_one'> or <html class='template_two'> and then you can define the presentational stuff for templates in a CSS file, like so:
.template_one body {background: #e7e7e7} .template_two body {background: #d7d7d7}Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!
Visual_Paradox,
I realized what you meant with the <body><div> stuff, but it just reminded me of the things you can do once you wrap more than one whole display page each in their own top-level div.
I agree, one <div> at the top level doesn't make much sense.
Are you aware of www.w3schools.com ? They are a good place to learn a lot of this stuff.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
You are not by any chance an art teacher, are you? Your avatar looks like someone I happen to know.
Uh . . . yes, boss, I sho' will, sir. I know how the game is supposed to be played and the rules an' such and how if you step outside the box the pressure of the void makes paste of the human evolution.
That's more like it.
While you're at it, convert your site to something anti-theist. Maybe have a subliminal flash of, "God is dead" every 45 seconds or so.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I'll see if maybe they have a code for something as stupid as that. And by stupid I mean the complete and utter ignorance of what exactly the word God means - 'cause damn. You don't have a clue. If you did you wouldn't suggest it in the first place.
You are not as gifted intellectually as you like to think. By the time you figure out the charts of your subscribed thougts they are already temporal. When that fact you are accustomed with then you have to sort it out and it will be too late. In other words you are drowning in your own ignorance.
OK then. Either you're joking, or Mr. Hyde just came out to play with a serious case of bi-polar Friday. But in either case, I'm not smart (For example, I have no idea what the second and third sentances in your last paragraph mean), but I am dashing and witty!
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Seriously though, did I do something to deserve that, David?
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
" if you step outside the box the pressure of the void makes paste of the human evolution." ????
Is that seriously supposed to make sense, or were you really trying to make up word soup?
"Pressure of the void"? A "void" which would be expected to have zero pressure leading to boiling blood, "paste" would imply extreme pressure, requiring lots of matter, ie the opposite of a "void".
"The human evolution"?? WTF is that supposed to mean? And "make paste" of it???
Add that to the two sentences mellestad referred to, and you really have me worried about what you have been drinking or smoking....
Or was that just your mind finally exploding at mellestad implying that you are the one being instructed here about web design, when you started this thread to impart some of your wisdom to us...
Must be a bit deflating to the ego to start a thread like this and then find everyone else who responds knows more about the topic than you do...sorry about that, Dave.
And BTW, the word "God" has NO exact meaning, or alternatively, it has billions, one version for each believer, or at least each sect of each religion, all convinced they know the 'correct' one. Which amounts to the same thing. A word which so many people disagree about has no 'correct' meaning in any real sense.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Especially when a bunch of us have gone out of their way to help you, that isn't really called for.
I guess drinking or drugs would explain the sudden shift from friendly and joking to incoherent RWARR!
Hope all is well, David. Sleep it off or something.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Lets play it out either way. Lets - on the first hand say that I was joking. And then on the second hand, which I assume is all that evolution has safely ammassed - the lot of it, say whatever the other was . . .
Hmmm?!
What now?
You see?
Exactly!
How come you look like Ted Nugent but you sound like Bill Nigh The Science Guy?
You see. Once you guys figure it out you have no choice.
Umm . . . I have to admit, in this particular instance . . . when it comes to web design there has been a great deal of wisdom espoused. By people like Mellestad and you who have nothing real to offer. In other words. Piss off.
Oh, I don't know. Where is your website?
God has a pretty good exact meaning. Ask your grandpa. He knows.
Like I said in the othe thread, I'll just leave this alone and see if you snap out of whatever you're doing right now.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
I will let you know when I snap out of whatever I'm doing right now - if you can pick up on that, otherwise shut the fuck up.
Haven't done much with my web-site for quite a while, got distracted with other stuff http://www.uq.net.au/~zzbspenc/index.html
That ISP has notified me they will be no longer offering web-hosting from June this year, so I intend to use that to motivate me to set up a new one on my new ISP. So far I am only using the new site for holding some photos to link to here, and some test pages.
What I have been doing lately is developing a couple of Web sites for other people which are not so much designed for general browsing, and are made to run on both a desktop and an Apple iOS device, ie iPhone or iPad. The iPhone one, which is most developed, requires login credentials, so you wouldn't get past the first page.
I am actually getting paid for those projects, so someone thinks I have some ability there.
Ask my Grandpa? If he was still around, I doubt you would agree with him. He was a Jehovah's Witness.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
About the website, Bob. I couldn't care less. About Grandpa - well I knew he was a Jehovah's Witness, but I didn't know he had passed away. Had you asked him when he was alive he would have set you straight if he he had known or cared to do so.
I am in the same place. Science, Bob, isn't - uh . . . how do I put this? Well! The end.
Although responses like that do tend to strain the old will power just a bit. I'll still be nice though because, gosh darn it, nice matters!
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Ok, so you just asked "where is my web-site" on the assumption that I probably didn't have one, to try and make me feel foolish.
Do you mean you are in the same place about your concept of God as the JW's?
And Science isn't the End, it is the beginning of some real knowledge and understanding of 'Life, the Universe, and Everything'.
I apologise for distracting you, I mainly came in response to Visual_Paradox's comments.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
BobSpence,
I know about W3 Schools, but I do not recommend it, for two main reasons. First, much of the information there is outdated, wrong, or just far too simplistic. Learning single commands in isolation is nice and all, but this conceals the problems that can crop up when attempting to use them together. And second, despite what their domain name suggests, they are not affiliated with the W3C -- for those not in the know: the W3C is the group responsible for creating and maintaining various web standards such as HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, SVG, MathML, etc. -- in any way, shape, or form, but they let people believe that falsehood because they profit from it. The only reason that website is even popular is because of that falsehood. And they even have a certification program. Having a certification from W3 Schools is like having a master's degree from the "university" that Kent Hovind got his from.
David Henson,
My avatar is a picture of me, but I'm not an art teacher. As for everything you said since you asked that question: WTF? Mellestad made one small joke and it seems to have thumped your skull and damaged your brain. This recent writing style of yours reminds me of that one episode of House where the patient had banged his head against the desk and then thought he was communicating when he talked but everyone else disagreed.
Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!
Visual_Paradox,
I must admit I have been drifting away from w3schools, to more authoritative sites. Someone else I met who was into web work first mentioned it to me.
I found some of their examples helpful to try out things, but I think I know what you mean, the more I get into the nuts and bolts of this stuff the less I find of use there.
I also had begun to notice that it seemed a bit behind the curve, as you say, which is probably what led me to start losing interest in it.
I just wondered if someone at the stage David appears to be might find it helpful.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
I know HTML.
Hey, it was the 90's, everyone was doing it!
I made some sweet web pages with flashing .Gifs and .midi soundtracks. Some awesome scrolling text too. Of course, the backgrounds were all black because I didn't want to be a square.
Then I started using Microsoft FrontPage and it blew. my. mind.
Seriously though, I learned HTML so I could design a page for "The Raptor's", my guild (which included me and an always shifting group of 1-2 random strangers) in an old pseudo MMO called Subspace. Or maybe it was the Grey Death Legion? I have no idea. But it was rad.
I'm ashamed.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.