Blog of Steve Savage A blog for business analysts and architects, and fellow user's of Sparx's EA

About

Summary

This site is owned by Steve Savage, and has existed in one form or another since 1995 when I created my first web page on my University of Waterloo internet account.

January 1st 2011 - a transitional? WordPress site.

Over the past few months I’ve been debating resurrecting my old website.   After some thought, I decided to create a transitional site using WordPress.  This site will allow me to focus on Business Analysis, Project Management, Information Management, and Software Development, while I slowly develop my requirements for a more permanent solution (which may or may not be WordPress).

2006 March 16th - Focusing the site.

I've decided to reduce the content of my site to the more useful tricks I've developed over the years such as: streaming flash video with ColdFusion, and the trick I mentioned earlier for browser specific stylesheets.  My more personal thoughts and memories have been moved offline.

2004 November 21st - The web is no longer my day job

I've stopped doing web development in my day job and have moved to project management and business analysis,
so don't expect many updates as I focus on developing my new skills as a business analyst.

2004 November 1st - Dropping table layouts

I am doing is dropping visual support for browsers that don't support CSS2. No more tables, pixel hacks or other old tricks. If your still using Netscape/IE 4.x you will be able to use my site, it just will not be very pretty.

2003 December 29th - Reworking old designs.

I'm going through several of my old site designs, and reworking them for the new technologies to provide multiple themes for my site's design and layout.

2003 August 17th - Update to Colfusion MX 6.1

Reworking some of the site's back end code to work with Coldfusion MX 6.1, way faster than before, and with better XML support.

2003 Feb. 20th - Trying out XML take 2

Taking another shot at converting my journal entries from an Access database to XML, I've decided to create a central site.xml file that contains all of my sites navigation, and the metadata for each section. Also created a script in Corel Photopaint to:

• go through all my photos
• copy them to the appropriate directory based on their date time stamp (entries/2002/05_01 etc.)
• create a thumbnail images of 100x100 and 50x50 croping to maintain the center of the image for wide images, and the top half for narrow images
• resample the image so that narrow images are 500 pixels wide and wide images are 650 pixels wide

Yeah, so I'm a geek, is that really a surprise?

2002 Dec. 2nd - Trying out XML

I'm finding MS Access is slowing down as my site grows, so I'm seeing if I can convert my journal from an Access database to XML based on what I've done recently for a project at work.

2002 Oct. 19th - Update to Coldfusion MX

Updated my ISP account to ColdFusion MX.

2002 May 5th - Redoing everything in XHTML and CSS2

I been spending most of my time as technical and project lead for the Common Look and Feel project.   During this project I've really dug in to cascading stylesheets, and was able to come up with a method of dealing with cross browser design issues in CSS.

I've used my new skills to create a multitude of layouts all using the same XHTML but
with different styles sheets: anatomy, boxes, dragons, gothic, juvenile, and nature.

2002 April 22nd - The Common Look and Feel Project

Took on the role of project lead for the Common Look and Feel project for Atmospheric Environment Services (AES).  The project has allowed me to learn a lot about creating accessible web sites, thanks to Environment Canada's accessibility office

2001 Sept. 9th - Closed Realitystorm.net

Finally found an ISP with reasonable prices for space/bandwidth, so decided to move my Realitystorm.com site, but close down my Realitystorm.net site and merge my personal and professional site in to a single domain.

2001 July 20th - Looking for a new server

My lease for my current virtual server is running out, and I don't like the options offered by the companies new owners (way to expensive), so I will need to find a new home for my site.

1999 August 8th - Realitystorm.com

In response to numerous enquiries regarding my availability for freelance design work I've decided to create a 'portfolio site', luckily the restrictions on .com domains being limited to businesses has been lifted.

1999 April 30 - Moving on from Geocities

Over the past year I have been working with ColdFusion 4.0 at work, developing several database driven sites, and
I've decided it's time to get off Geocities and start using my new skills on my personal site.

I've built a simple set of password protected forms for updating and adding pages and photos, with the backend written in ColdFusion 4.0 using a MS-Access Database.

I've left a fairwell page for anyone that stumbles accross my old home.

1997 March - Realitystorm.net

I decided to get my own domain name for my Geocities account.

The name Realitystorm is from a Neil Gaiman Story called Worlds' End

1997 - Experimenting with CSS and "Layers" - The Fish Tank.

Around the same time both browsers introduced some basic support for Cascading Style Sheets, and added the ability to manipulate the layout and content of any part of your page using JavaScript... but not in the same way. This is when the browser incompatibilities really started being a pain.

I tried using CSS, but the implementation was horribly buggy in Netscape (and required that JavaScript be turned on for them to work), and IE and Netscape did not interpret CSS commands in the same way (the IE box model problem for example). I basically gave up on CSS for anything other than basic formatting (fonts, colours), relying on table formats for several years until Netscape 6.0 came out in 2000.

What I did find fun to play with was using JavaScript to manipulate "Layers", and created several libraries of code to create animations, demonstrated with my Fish Tank in your browser.

1997 dealing with browser wars

In 1997 Netscape 4.0 was released and also Internet Explorer 4.0, unfortunately other than basic HTML and CSS, these
two browsers were completely different in how did pretty much anything.

I tried to use the new CSS features for layout and ended up with constantly crashing browsers, and weird layout effects.
This put me off CSS so much that I stuck with table layouts until the Release of Netscape 6 in 2000.

What I did have a lot of fun with is the new DHTML features of the two browsers, including my creation of a vitural fish tank, that later became the basis for my own cross browser DHTML library.

1996 Nov - Moved to Geocities.com

I started my Geocities site during my last year of university to move my personal site off my school account. At the time I was heavily in to Celtic mythology and legends, so when attempting to come up with a user name, I decided on "TheDruid".  Since that time I've learned how little we actually know about the practices of the Celts, and I feel a little
silly for taking the name.

While at University I worked for Environment Canada for several months, and after University I returned to do a Java coding contract with a research scientist, in my free time I continued to work on my site. When my contract was nearing it's end, I asked around to see if anyone was looking for a developer, and included my personal site in my resume, the manager of the newly formed web group liked what he saw and I became a public servant.

1995 Oct - Experimenting with Frames and JavaScript

In 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0Beta was released, introducing JavaScript 1.0 (later resulting in ECMAScript) and Frames.

I experiment with frames, but other that using them to keep my site menu fixed on the screen while the content scrolled, I found them more trouble than they where worth (you could only book mark one frame, and people would "steal" content by using your content within their frames), and stoped using them after about a year.

JavaScript on the other hand was an interesting toy, mainly I used it to create "mouse over" effects in my graphics, and to update more than one frame at a time when a link was clicked. Many people didn't like JavaScript, and would disable it, so I really couldn't rely on it, so I didn't find much use for it until NetScape 4.0 and IE 4.0 came out.

1995 Apr - My first Site

My first site was developed for Netscape 1.1, using tables for layout (added for Netscape 1.1) and Corel 5.0 PhotoPaint the student edition for graphics.

Unfortunately I no longer have the files from this site, the floppy they were on got lost in one of my many student moves. I was sitting in the physics computer lab at U of Waterloo looking up some information using gopher, when I noticed a friend of mine, Tracy Carol working on another computer with something called Netscape open.

After a quick lesson by Tracy on how to set up my personal account to host a site, I decided to give making a webpage a try. The date is an estimate, I know I started after Netscape 1.1. was available, but before the release of the Netscape 2.0 beta.