When About.Com published my Great Adventure, I felt that it was about time that I should continue the story ... I uploaded the Great Adventure sometime in February 2000. As I write this, it is September 2000, some seven months after the Great Adventure was first exposed to the Web. Seven months is a long time, and there is a lot to recount. So what have I been doing since February 2000?
A lot of my time during these past months have been dedicated to mastering the basics of making graphics for the Web. I started with Adobe Photoshop 5.0 just after uploading The Great Adventure. I have been wondering about the Graphics people use on websites then. I myself had been a frequent visitor to sites that provide them for free. In fact, my first experiments with Web Graphics involved the use of background images, buttons, animated gifs and icons for themed web pages. Atelier Cornichon was my favorite haunt. I also spent a lot of time at the WebVodoo. But then, I started wishing that I can generate my own themed web graphics. This happened at around Christmas of 1999 when I couldn't find the web graphics I wanted for a Christmas page. I scoured different websites looking for the look and feel that I wanted to project on my pages. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any that satisfied me. It was then that I decided I wanted to make my own.
So I got Adobe Photoshop 5.0. It was already well publicized then. I even asked a Graphics expert at AskMe.Com about it and he just confirmed the advertisements I have been reading. I asked for the tutorials that can help me begin using the software and he was kind enough to give me a substantial list of websites I can try. My first month with Photoshop was difficult. I had to master the use of the Basic Tools they provide with the software. There were certain things that I found difficult to understand, like the Photoshop Actions, which I had the chance to learn about only after I found a website explaining some things about it and providing downloadable Actions that I can try out. (As of this writing, I still cannot make my own Photoshop Actions. Perhaps I will need a book for this...)
About the same time that I was trying out Photoshop, I also came upon a free software from Sausage softwares. It is called "Reptile". What the software does is to make texture backgrounds. It generates them using presets which one can always customize. I found the software interesting, but I just couldn't stay long with it. Background images were the least of my problems then. I wanted images that I can use for a specific theme. Since I was very inexperience, experimenting with the presets of "Reptile" took a lot of time. So I concentrated on working with Photoshop with scanner programs using images that I have generated.
I was using Photoshop then with a lot of scanned photos. Most of the results of this experimentation went into the image maps and the backgrounds I used for Agustinong Pinoy. The exuberance of a beginner carried me away when I finally got the Photoshop Plug In Filters working. Sometime in May, my new ISP provided me with a free web space (some 3 megabytes of it) that I used as an experiment in themed web site design. With the amount of graphics that I put in it, the site turned out to be a browser crasher. I called the site "Ang Frayle" hoping that the graphics would make it as friendly looking as Friar Tuck. But, like Rizal's Fray Damaso, "Ang Frayle" turned out to be quite ruthless in bandwidth terms. The site still stands however ... a monument to my madness. It is a good example of what not to do with web graphics.
Some time in July, my old site at Geocities became Agustinong Pinoy.Com. It got me busy for a while adding new services remodelling some of its pages. When Yahoo entered it into its directory, I knew I had to do something. But apart from remodelling it and adding some pages about the inculturation of Augustinian thought and spirituality, there was nothing much I can do with the site. Too bad I just can't think of anything new to add to it at the moment. The site is dedicated to just one theme: The inculturation of Augustinian thought and spirituality within a Filipino context. At the moment, I am just out of ideas.
Mid-August saw me on another web building activity, this time for our school. The Colegio San Agustin-Bacolod website hosted at Geocities is, I think, quite a work. To date, (I write this in October 18, 2000) it numbers to about 132 web pages, with custom graphics, some special effects with Javascript, DHTML, and some pages validated for HTML 4.01 by W3c.Org . It is already in the indexes of some search engines (Google, Altavista, Yahoo) and is gaining quite some traffic, thanks to the Free Services provided by some leading websites. During the time I was building the web site, I was able to work on HTML 4.0 and Cascading Style Sheets. I also gained some smattering of javascript programming along the way, thanks to HTMLGoodies and the javascript tutorials of Bravenet. This last item brings me to...
Read The Context. It is an Adventure by itself.
After a year of taking from the Web, I finally was able to come up with something I can give back. Your Simple WebPageMaker is a javascript-driven HTML editor that helps in the creation of web pages. It has a preview feature, graphic browsers, some other utilities for meta tags, table making... and I have even used it for creating web pages for our school's site and as an aid for teaching other people the basics of HTML.
The script for Your Simple WebPageMaker is not solely mine. I found the original script at Java City.Com by an unnamed author. With a bit of experimentation, I rearranged the script, adding some more features to it (most from the Javafile), and adding some of my own javascript concoctions to make it what it is today. (Currently, I am calling it Your Simple WebPageMaker 1.1+). To visit Your Simple WebPageMaker, just click here! It has been featured in FreeSiteTools and at About.Com.
One of the best ways to learn is to teach, provided that one does not cease to learn in teaching. This was the reason why I enrolled as one of the Basic HTML "Experts" at AskMe.Com. It is also the reason why I decided to put up my own HTML Tutorial. When I started the tutorial, I was quite aware that there were others offering much much better lessons than I can presently offer. But I too was aware that I can offer something that others cannot: I started to learn HTML because of my misadventures with WYSIWYGs. Besides, mine is the only Tutorial that comes with an HTML exerciser (wholly my script!), a feature which I have not seen in any of the tutorials I have attended in the past. Besides, having one more HTML tutorial won't hurt... it is only another witness that HTML is alive and kicking -- malgrado i WYSIWYGs!