Site Help & Information

Pop-up Windows

This site uses Javascript to open 'pop-up' windows in only two circumstances: for the 'login' panel and for displaying images. The login panel closes after you try to login, whether you are successful or not; and it times out and closes if you do not attempt to login at all. In the case of displaying images, the script will always open subsequent images in the same window as any previously-displayed image, so you will not end up with more than one display window open at a time. The display window will be sized to suit the image displayed in it and, if the script works correctly, will be centered on your screen. The script is one of the first I ever wrote so if it fails to behave in the manner I have described, please let me know and I'll try to fix it. It will help if you advise me which browser/version you use, what your screen resolution is and which image you were attempting to display.

*** Stop press: this doesn't work properly in IE7 - you'll see the images but they don't open as planned. Watch this space...

I'm aware that many people - me included - use pop-up blocking software to make Web surfing a slightly more enjoyable experience. The only pop-up windows you will encounter on this site are as described above: I promise that you will not see any pop-ups which you have not specifically requested and that there are no pop-up adverts. Under these circumstances you may wish to turn off pop-up blocking while you are in this site, especially if you intend to change login areas frequently and/or display a lot of images.

Click here to test whether you have pop-ups enabled.

External Links

Whenever I refer to an external company, product, location, publication or other resource anywhere in these pages, I will endeavour to provide a link to the appropriate external Web site. These links are not pop-ups - they will open in separate, standard, resizeable browser windows complete with menu bar, tool bar, scroll bars, etc. Please advise me if any of these links appear broken, or if there is no link where you think there should be one.

Restricted Areas

There are restricted areas on this Web site which require passwords to access. If you believe that you should have access to these areas, please email me.

Technical Information

This Web site was written entirely using UltraEdit-32, one of the most powerful and flexible text editors I have ever used. Visit the IDM Computer Solutions Web site at www.ultraedit.com for details of this product.

Many of the design and coding techniques I've used are borrowed from Idocs Inc's HTML tutorial at www.htmlcodetutorial.com and W3 Schools' online HTML and Javascript tutorials at www.w3schools.com.

I also splashed out the best part of sixty quid on a couple of excellent books: 'Web Design In A Nutshell' by Jennifer Niederst and 'Javascript: The Definitive Guide' by David Flanagan (both published by O'Reilly & Associates). I heartily recommend them both, as well another O'Reilly book 'Programming PHP' by Rasmus Lerdorf & Kevin Tatroe.

Web space is courtesy of Blueyonder , broadband connection is from Telewest and domain name registration is via Freeparking. FTP used to be via the very intuitive and easy to use SmartFTP until they started charging $36.95 for home use: now I use AceFTP which is free and after just ten minutes use is looking every bit as good. Content retrieval uses the universally-acclaimed Apache Software Foundation Web server. Page counters are courtesy of Counting4Free and search engine indexing was by SubmitExpress. (Indexing was done on 9/1/2004: please let me know if you found this Web site via a search engine!)