« About Ackadia »

Aims of this site

This site is an extension of myself in many ways. Everything that interests me and educates my family and friends will find it's way here. Whether it's a solution for the latest D&D game, a tutorial for my cousin, a discourse on xDSL technology or my rants and raves about current topics in the computer world...

These pages are added to most days, it's content improving with time. As my children grow and show more interest in surfing the net so this site will mature and evolve.

Have you got a decent site? Think you'll fit? If so, then drop me an e-mail and I'll review your site.

Vendors and trade suppliers please note, sooner or later I will add you all to these pages, so why not drop me a line and make it sooner...

So, be welcome and enjoy. If you feel you have anything to add to improve this for one and all, please do.

Use our contact page to reach me.

Incidentally, the burned edge effect on our (previous) logo was done with Alienskin's Xenofex 2

The site:

Who links to Ackadia

The pages are now optimised for the Firefox browser at a resolution of 1024x768 resolution or better, but are tested to work equally usually with any browser, at any resolution. Due to the inclusion of Google ads and moving the menu to the side the pages and content will be ugly but usable at 640x480. I will work around this in the coming months.

I set it up around Nov 1998. One of these days I'll get round to promoting Ackadia properly. Be a while yet mind.

Looking at the stats I actually get about 5 million "hits" a year. Wow, popular eh. When you see sites with millions of "hits" remember two things. First off the count is an editable thing, secondly hits are not the same as visitors. For the latter I seem to get about 175,000 a year, which about 170,000 a year more than I figured so I'm happy.

Having moved to a better host, I now have : Webalizer Web Statistics.
N.B. This link is for my convenience, access is restricted.

Out of interest, and this really surprised me, the full web analysis shows we are now (Dec 2003) getting 500 new visitors a day, well, there you go. Encourages me to get on with it.

We saw a noticeable dip on August 6th 2004 when we moved from HTML to PHP but it's climbing back up to normal again. The huge drops for "hits" "files" and especially bandwidth are as expected as I've moved away from graphical link buttons. Better for accessibility too.

On pages and hits ...:

The basic site was written in about a week in November of '98 (couple of hours a night). This included learning HTML! The next few years will be spent adding content and links. At some point in the future I may add some javascripts, but I won't be touching frames as I just don't like them!

For design, this is all hand coded and will remain so. I looked at a number of web packages but they just seem to produce sloppy code. Of course, that was year ago and web editor, especially Macromedia Dreamweaver have improved massively. I still prefer a text editor mind.

The early days...

I used to include a table of hits but they out by a factor of at least 50! I was thinking around 3,000 a year - in the past year alone we have had 173,000 unique visitors - perhaps 180,000+ by the end of the year. More than anything it shows the difference a proper page counter makes. Maybe one day I'll use a professional one with even better breakdowns.



The reference and study material I used at the time was: www.darkmountain.com

"Teach Yourself Web Publishing" by Laura Lemay. Sams.net books ISBN 1-57521-064-9 Lemay's home page

"HTML Reference Library v2.2" by Stephen Le Hunte (at the time, of Swansea University)

Out of interest, lately I've recently been thinking, wondering really, if a html editor would enable me to update the pages faster. To this end, I've started looking at other peoples source code to see what generated it. I'll update this as I remember!

• Any good text editor - I use TextPad myself.
• Microsoft exports and Frontpage - wouldn't touch it with a bargepole unless absolutely necessary!
• Claris Home Page (v1.0) used with Adobe PageMill (v3.0 Mac) looks very tidy. Over liberal repeating the Height and Width setting but in general, very clean. Worth a thought.
• Macromedia Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver MX Studio rock! Forget the rest, go with the best - Or hand code like I prefer.

CLIPART
With the exception of corporate logo's etc (used to link to their sites) a lot of the artwork is done with CorelDraw - either using and editing the clip-art libraries, or designing my own images.
I don't mind folk using my own work as long as I'm asked first...

The updated graphics (version 4.0) have largely been done with Macromedia's Fireworks.
The v5 images menu buttons where done with PaintShop Pro 8 (and Aliens Softwares' Xenofix 2).


Subsequent books on HTML I read and found useful include:

Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours by Dick Oliver
    Published by SAMS   ISBN 0-67231369-3

He has also written a book entitled "Teach Yourself Javascript in 24 Hours" which I shall look into (eventually).

Check out his site - The 24 Hour Cafe

Awards:

WooHoo! My first award
Technically, I applied for it, but Eva of Swedish Golden Retrievers actually sent me an email complimenting me and recommending I apply. As a rule I don't hold with "Awards" as so many are fake, but I'll happily make an exception here. I'm far, far more interested in folk visiting and telling me where I'm going right - and equally where I'm going wrong - than the self congratulatory logo's that plaster some sites you see.

Dear Paul,

It is with great pleasure I present your website "Ackadia" with my Red Paw Award. I have been visiting your site several times and I find it very interesting every time. You have created a web site that is very harmonic in outline and gives a calm impression. It is a site to stay on and explore. You should also have bonus for your concerns about those people in this word who are suffering of colour blindness. Well done! The site is also a great resource for webmasters.