Site maintenance

On this page, I give some information on how I maintain this site.

Editing

For editing, I use use MySample, the sample editor that I developed based on the Crystal Edit edit control. I extended it with colour coding for HTML and embedded JavaScript. It also has the ability to follow links (with anchor) using F5 which results in opening the target file (on the anchor, if there is any) or opens the link in the default browser if it is an external link. With F5 on an errors.txt file, it can also jump to the line of a file. The editor was developed under windows with Microsoft Foundation Class Library and does not run well under all versions of Wine. Currently I am using Wine 7.9. In the past, I also used: Notepad, Wordpad, and q by Semware when editing on the Toshiba laptop under DOS.

Internal link checking and uploading

From my HTML-to-LaTeX program, I created a HTML syntax and link checker: chkhtml.c. I call this through a scipt that redirects the output to the errors.txt file. The script also executed the cp2ftp script that is produced by the program to copy new/updated file to the ftp folder, which is used for uploading files. Finally, the script opens the errors.txt file with the MySample editor allowing errors to be fixed easily. The HTML check program also updates the site statistics as found on my home page. (When in the past when I was still working under Windows, an earlier version of the program was called from the chkhtml.bat batch-file.) For uploading, I use an old version of WS_FTP.

External link checking

Graphics

Although I do not focus on graphics on my web pages, there is enough of it. In the last years, I often make use of embedded JavaScript for generating graphics. When I include pictures, I usaully use XNview Version 1.12 (Dec 16 1999) by Pierre-e Gougelet for cropping, colour corrections, and or scaling. In the past, I did use: MGI PhotoSuite SE (Starter Edition) Version 1.06 (which came with the Phantom 636 scanner), QV Version 2.5 (by Cyril Cambiem), GIMP version 1.2.0 for Windows, and or MS Paint. (Annabel used QV to make some drawings.)

Scanning text

The best way to scan some text for web display is:

Scan on 600 dpi with very high contrast and zero saturation resulting in an almost black-white image.
Using XNView, average twice with 3x3 pixels.
Using XNView, reduce size to 15% using bilinear resampling.
Using XNView, save as GIF with grey scale 256.
Using QV, turn into grey-16.
Using QV, save as GIF.

For an example, look at this image, which is only 21.812 bytes in size. If you zoom in on these kind of scans, you notice the amouth of grey pixels in the image, and that the text actually become less readable. If you have only a 300 dpi scanner, you can use the following recipe (thanks to Henk Vink):

Scan on 300 dpi with very high contrast and zero saturation.
Using XNView, average once with 3x3 pixels.
Using XNView, reduce size to 30% using bilinear resampling.
Using XNView, save as GIF with grey scale 256.
Using QV, turn into grey-16.
Using QV, save as GIF.

Creating transparent GIF's

For creating transparent GIF's, I use my own program program (8 Kbyte MS-DOS executable), which I wrote myself after seeing a small perl script doing the trick. If you run the program it displays the color table. The program allows you to give you an index of the color that should be made transparent and to specify an output file.

File exchange

In the early years of this website, when I used various computers on which I did my editing (at last only ester and the Toshiba laptop), I maked use of a MS-DOS floppy. The reason behind using the MS-DOS filename format, is because the Toshiba laptop runs under MS-DOS.

I wrote a small C program to support the file exchanges. For the mapping between the long filename format and the "short" MS-DOS filename format, it made use of a file with the name content.l2s which is stored on the exchange floppy. When the program was executed, it compares the files on the floppy with the files on the harddisk based on the mapping described in contents.l2s. Based on this, it produced a batch file with all copy statements for transfering the files. I Usually edited this batch file first, before I executed it, to remove the files that I did not want to transfer.

The program was called by the batch-file syncro.bat, which was executed in the home directory of all the files that make up this site. This batch-file made a directory listing of this directory in the file compare\dir.txt, and a directory listing of the floppy in the file compare\adir.txt. Then the syncro program was called and the output was directed to the batch-file syncflds.bat, which was then edited with notepad. On my desktop, I had a short cuts to the syncro.bat and syncflds.bat batch-files. Even before that, I had used more advanced programs, and I also experimented with a VB program, but this simple set-up worked the best as it gave me full control over the whole file copying process.

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