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This site was cobbled together - sorry, put together - over about 10 days, between shifts in a local distribution warehouse, and at weekends. The rather slapdash, uneven, unprofessional, and text-based nature of the site reflects the hasty construction of these pages, as well as the fact that I am very new to HTML. This latter point hasmeant that I have gone for effectiveness rather than style, elegance, good coding practice, or convention: my aim was to get the thing done, as quickly as possible, using the limited expertise and experience that I had (have).
I used my trusty old Mitac 486 - DX100, running on 8MB of memory and a 1 GB hard-disk (you can probably hear the disk chunking away from where you are). This small capacity meant that I was constrained in my use of sound and graphics, since it took so long to achieve anything that by the time it was finished I had forgotten why I had started. So you will have to buy Billy Bragg's CD with 'Blake's Jerusalem' on it rather than listen to the sound file that was to have been on my site.
Most of the pages were created using hand-written HTML on MS Notepad, guidance being provided by Wrox Press's 'Instant HTML - Programmer's Reference' (Wrox Press, 1997): this proved to be a very useful source of information, and I would probably have achieved much more by now if I had had the time to work through it systematically - it is very clearly written and has comprehensive reference sources throughout. The academic essays and the dissertation were converted from MS Word using a variety of editors - HTMLED32 and Frontpage amongst them - depending on which one seemed to do the job best. Hence the uneven look of the pages and the various styles of HTML coding. The pages were trialled on IE 3.02 only - if they look weird on other browsers, I apologise - but I've only got the one... The files were transmitted using Ipswitch's WS_FTP Pro, which is a smashing little product, proving itself particularly useful when I discovered that the non-uniformity of my file-names and cross-references made my web-site unusable, and needed to edit, rename, and retransmit everything...
The pictures used on these pages are credited on the pages that they appear on. Any uncredited ones will be referenced later. My apologies.
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