About this web site

History

When I saw this new thing called the "World Wide Web" for the first time, I knew I wanted to be part of it and I created my first home page. This was in 1993, the time when the web was young, when there was still one web page at CERN listing all the web sites in the world, the time when Mosaic came out, the graphical web browser that made the web really usable.

At first my home page was only accessible to myself, because the university in Freiburg didn't have a web server back then. But later that year when I moved to Karlsruhe, I put up my first real public home page on the university server there. It was updated every once in a while - and fell into disrepair for long stretches of time in between. In 1995 my web pages moved to the INKA web server and in 1998 they moved to my new home in cyberspace on remote.org. Since then, this domain is my permanent home on the Internet and hopefully will be for a long time.

Why?

There are several reasons why I have a web page. Historically the first reason was the curiosity with the new medium of the World Wide Web. I was interested not only in browsing the Web, but also in understanding how it works. And there is no better way to find out how the Web works than setting up your own web page.

At first my web page was embarrassingly empty. I really had not many things to tell the world and, apart from my address and telephone number, my home page contained mostly links to other pages I thought interesting. But over time more and more content assembled and today it allows at least a glimpse into my life.

Today I publish some of my programs here, travelogues, papers, and whatever I think other people might me interested in. And these pages are still an ongoing experiment. There is always something new to add or some old junk to be rearranged or thrown out altogether.

Tools

When I started creating web pages, no fancy HTML editors existed. Those were the days, when men were still men and you either created web pages the hard way - manually editing the HTML tags - or not at all. All you had and all you needed was an ASCII editor and for me this is still the most important tool for working on my web pages. I use the vim editor for HTML pages, as well as for writing emails, programming, and many other things.

But to manage any web site larger then a few pages more tools are needed: The common layout, navigational links, site map, etc. on my web site are automatically generated by a program called HyTeC (the Hyper Text Compiler), written by myself for the specific purpose of helping me organize my web site. Together with the web page content and layout HyTeC has evolved over the years from a shell script using make and the C pre-processor cpp to a complex Perl program. It reads "HTML source code" along with some meta data and transforms it into the final web pages adding layout elements, navigational elements such as "Next" and "Previous" links, last change date and other things where needed. Also a site map is created automatically.

HyTeC also helps me with the bilingual pages. I only edit one file using special tags to delimit the texts from different languages and HyTeC will automatically created the different web pages from that.

The web pages are created and edited on my computer at home. Once I am happy with the results, the pages are uploaded with rsync to the real web server running Apache.

While the internal links are consistent most of the time, because they are automatically generated by HyTeC, external web pages come and go at an alarmingly high rate. Looking at several link checkers available on the Net and finding them all lacking some necessary features, I wrote my own, the Flinch Link Checker. It runs automatically every night and checks all the links and if a link has been unreachable for a few days it will send me an email telling me so. This is an invaluable tool for keeping my web page up to date.

Language

Some of my web pages are written in German, some are in English, and many are available in both languages. This is a bit more effort for me, but it helps me practicing English and it helps people in the world reading my pages.

The pages are automatically presented to you in your preferred language if it is available. You can change the preferred language by changing your browser settings. If neither English nor German is configured in your browser, you will get the English language page anyway.

Best viewed with any browser

My pages will not look perfect on all web browsers; this is just not possible with so many browsers out there. But I strive to make them readable and moderately well looking with the primary browsers out there. This includes text mode browsers such as Links and w3m. I try to use CSS style sheets for layout as much as possible, but many layout ideas can only be implemented by using tricks such as invisible tables. Sorry!

The web is an open platform that can be used by everyone, regardless of the make of computer she is using or the type of browser. And it should remain that way. That is why my pages don't use proprietary extensions. Also I am avoiding most of the fancy stuff like frames and Javascript, they tend to get in the way more often then they do something useful. (Unfortunately you still have to enable Javascript if you are using the Netscape browser, because otherwise the CSS style sheet is not interpreted correctly.)

Also, I am not using Cookies, web bugs, or redirection CGIs. Your right to privacy is more important than my curiosity as to how you are browsing the web. But I do generate statistics out of the web server log files, because seeing what parts of my site people are using helps me build a better site.

XML and XHTML

Everybody is talking about XML these days, and because XML has some real advantages I have started using it, too. Some of the pages are already using XHTML instead of HTML, but changing everything over to full XML compliance will take some time. The HyTeC tool mentioned is left over from the times before XML so there is no built-in XML support.