Introduction.
I have been asked by a number of people whom I have met on the Internet to describe the process I went through and the tools I used to build this particular site. On reflection, the process was both instructive, from the perspective of a net neophyte, and illuminating to me, as an individual involved in the process. I hope this is helpful to you, the reader, as well.
Assuming that you have read His Story, you already know that I answered questions Precious asked of me by writing a brief autobiography. This autobiography was expanded over time, in response to her additional questions. What created the structure of the story was the story by Tommy about the KGC Kitten Club, a story which caused me to look at myself with a level of introspection I had previously never undertaken. I thought that if Tommy's story had such a strong impact on me, then the brief story of my life might be beneficial to someone else in some small way. Since I had discovered Tommy's story on the web, I thought it would be appropriate to publish His Story in the same manner. Although I later discovered, to my great disappointment, that Tommy's story was only factual only up until the section when the KGC Kitten Club is introduced, I decided to make His Story as factual as one who is immersed in the life being described can be.
I looked around for sites on which to post the story and finding no site on which I could publish the story with absolute control over its content, I decided that I would have to bite the bullet, learn what was needed and put up my own site. I quickly learned that there are a number of different hosts on which one could put up a site, hosts who charge not those who put up the sites, but the advertisers whose ads appear whenever a surfer lands on one of these sites. I had begun following several newsgroups as a lurker; I did not yet know the means by which I could interact with others without disclosing my own identity. Since I had chosen to register a domain in my name, it would be trivially easy to link my domain name with me both as a person and employee in a large corporation. The downside to this would probably be financially unbeneficial. <grin>
Based on what I was reading in the newsgroups I followed, it appeared as though GeoCities was the "happening" host. Web space was free, but limited. I didn't need much and GeoCities also offered what appeared at first blush to be a modicum of anonymity. Only later did I discover that the anonymity was more perceived than actual. So, I signed up. The process of signing up on GeoCities requires the user to select a neighborhood from among the increasingly large collection offered. Each of these neighborhoods is characterized by a common theme or interest shared by its squatters. Since I was a crossdresser, it was suggested to me that the most appropriate neighborhood would be WestHollywood, the location reserved for the gay, lesbian and other "gender bending" communities. I moved in and created, using the GeoCities editor, a five line place-holder site. Had I known the consternation my choice of neighborhoods would produce in me, I probably would have been better off by just waiting and trying to make another choice.
The problem I was having was relatively simple. I was not gay; I knew I was not gay and I also knew that I would have a hard time convincing my spouse (whose first fear was that I was gay or preparing to undergo sexual reassignment surgery), among others, that I really was not gay if I put my site up in a primarily gay neighborhood. Although it does smack of homophobia and intolerance, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, society will usually conclude that it is a duck... I was not trying to put down gays and lesbians; I was simply trying to preserve my marriage.
Tools.
I learn more by example than any other way. I needed something which would permit me cobble up a site in short order, based on the work of someone else. I looked at the various tools out in the marketplace and, after a little research, concluded that there were three types. The first are HTML editors, of which HoTMetaL and HotDog are excellent examples. These tools assume that you are going to build your site either from scratch or using one of their templates. The downside to this class of tools is that they all require the user to become fairly knowledgeable about HTML, the Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is essentially parentheses on steroids. The "tags" are usually paired and cause whatever occurs between them to be effected in a specific way. <center> humma humma </center> will cause the text "humma humma" to become centered, etc. This is pretty low level and requires that the user make a change and then fire up a browser to see what the effect of the change will be. I got the tools, tried them out and was left very unsatisfied.
The second class of tools are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page editors. For the most part, these tools came to the IBM-PC market from earlier Macintosh implementations. The idea here is that you start with either a blank screen or one based upon a template, and then you graphically add elements to the page until you get what you want. For me, this is much, much, much more satisfying. I had an idea of what my pages would look like and had already begun grabbing the various components I would be using on the site (such as the spiral binding you see on the left edge of this page). There were several tools in this group and I went through them in succession, DeltaPoint's QuickSite, Adobe's PageMill and NetObjects' Fusion.
About the time I had decided to switch over to one of the WYSIWYG (or as I later discovered, What You See Is Something Like What You Get) editors, GeoCities added a new neighborhood, FashionAvenue. This was much more like what I needed. I knew that I had always been interested in fashion, albeit a fairly narrow slice, and by having my site on FashionAvenue, I would not have the emotional conflict I had been suffering under while trying to put up a site in WestHollywood. I felt freed from constraints and began working on the site in earnest.
I discovered a number of problems with QuickSite, among the worst was that the graphical editor in QuickSite did not apply to the entire page, but only that between the first and last horizontal bars. I did not see a way I could produce my opening page under that restriction. So, it was on to PageMill. I was very successful with this tool. It is easy to use and fairly intuitive. What it was lacking was any means by which I could produce templates to use in "stamping" out future pages. Look and feel is very important to me and I wanted my site to have a consistent look and feel throughout. The opening page is a book cover and all of the pages therein are to look as though they belong in the same book. I could do this with PageMill, but it took some effort.
I got much of the site completed using PageMill and was quite pleased with the product. As I had imposed upon the people at NetObjects, whose overpriced Fusion product was supposed to do what I wanted with templates, when they reduced the price as I had asked, I felt compelled to buy it. Fusion does have templates and they are very nice indeed. The one downside to Fusion, and this is a HUGE downside, is that the product only does absolute placement on the page. The page must be formatted for the smallest screen which will be used to view it as the text will not automatically wrap. Doing development on a wide screen, but recognizing that readers might not have the same advantage, I needed the benefits which came with relative placement.
Just at this time, I had the opportunity to try using FrontPage98. FrontPage97 was the third class of tools. It was based upon tables, the same kind of tables one finds in Word. If you love Word, you would probably have liked FrontPage97. Frontpage98 offers some significant improvements over the 97 version in both its feature set and its relative robustness. I imported the site into FrontPage98 and then began the work of adding the pages I needed. FrontPage98 is pretty straight forward and easy to use. I recommend it.
The graphics programs I used were MGI PhotoSuite and Adobe PhotoShop LE. I used PhotoSuite to do most of the work on the graphics on these pages. PhotoShop was used only for the buttons. I used Web Tidy and Bobby to ferret out any HTML errors or accessibility concerns.
That is pretty much the whole of it. I am continuously experimenting with different tools and will probably try some others in the future.
Last Update: 07/15/2002
Web Author: [email protected]
Copyright �;1998 by Taffy Cheerful - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
