Comments on: My first “real” program http://oldskoolblog.com/2006/06/28/my-first-real-program/ Reliving the past 8 bits at a time Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:41:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: arb http://oldskoolblog.com/2006/06/28/my-first-real-program/#comment-176 arb Wed, 28 Jun 2006 22:41:04 +0000 http://oldskoolblog.com/2006/06/28/my-first-real-program/#comment-176 Yay for teh blinder! ;-) My first web site was for my then employer, the La Trobe Shire Council. We had a 56K dial up line and the site lived on a box at our end of the line for some time. I knew bugger all about HTML and Javascript, yet I managed to get something reasonably decent up and running over the space of about a week. Being 1997, naturally I used frames and glassy, rounded, chiseled buttons, generated by one of the multitudinous button-maker programs available at the time. My piece de resistance was the location map - I scanned in a map from one of our brochures, but it was not good enough for the web site, so I turned that scan into a black & white mask, creaed some nice gradient fills and stamped out the shapes of the ocean and land. I pasted these stamps into a new Paintbrush document, carefully added some shadow highighting, <em>very</em> carefully drew in the major towns and roads (correcting a major blunder in the original map in the process) and finally adding labels and a title to the map. Most of this was done in Paintbrush because that was all I had available to me. I spent the beast part of a day on that map and was danged proud of how it turned out. Even after the site got a professional make-over my map stayed prominently displayed. My one real achievement in the world of grahic design! ;^) Yay for teh blinder! ;-)
My first web site was for my then employer, the La Trobe Shire Council. We had a 56K dial up line and the site lived on a box at our end of the line for some time. I knew bugger all about HTML and Javascript, yet I managed to get something reasonably decent up and running over the space of about a week.

Being 1997, naturally I used frames and glassy, rounded, chiseled buttons, generated by one of the multitudinous button-maker programs available at the time. My piece de resistance was the location map - I scanned in a map from one of our brochures, but it was not good enough for the web site, so I turned that scan into a black & white mask, creaed some nice gradient fills and stamped out the shapes of the ocean and land. I pasted these stamps into a new Paintbrush document, carefully added some shadow highighting, very carefully drew in the major towns and roads (correcting a major blunder in the original map in the process) and finally adding labels and a title to the map. Most of this was done in Paintbrush because that was all I had available to me. I spent the beast part of a day on that map and was danged proud of how it turned out. Even after the site got a professional make-over my map stayed prominently displayed. My one real achievement in the world of grahic design! ;^)

]]> By: blinder http://oldskoolblog.com/2006/06/28/my-first-real-program/#comment-175 blinder Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:16:29 +0000 http://oldskoolblog.com/2006/06/28/my-first-real-program/#comment-175 that's easy, in that it wasn't that long ago, about 14 years ago or so. i was a graphic designer, publishing a zine, and i got some web space from my local isp. well, i slapped up a few html pages but wanted something a bit more. i noticed a few sites i would see had the ability for people to leave comments on their pages. i had no idea how that worked until i noticed one such page had a link to a free cgi script site. well, i went there and downloaded a few guestbook cgi scripts and after about a week of playing with one, i managed to get it to work (just by sheer will and determination, because, at the time, that's all i had, absolutely no background in computers). well, after about week of that i decided i wanted to create my own. oh boy. i learned that this cgi script was written in a thing called PERL. i had no idea what that was, oh sure i knew what computer languages were, they were things for smart people with math degrees. i was neither. but, not really caring, i just said "fuck it" and locked myself in my family's home office and spent all my spare time learning this crazy languge. it took about 6 months to finally "get it." and even then my code was crap, but i had a working guestbook. feeling confident in that, and it being 1995, i figured "hey i learn this new java thing." and yeah... the rest is history. that’s easy, in that it wasn’t that long ago, about 14 years ago or so. i was a graphic designer, publishing a zine, and i got some web space from my local isp. well, i slapped up a few html pages but wanted something a bit more. i noticed a few sites i would see had the ability for people to leave comments on their pages. i had no idea how that worked until i noticed one such page had a link to a free cgi script site. well, i went there and downloaded a few guestbook cgi scripts and after about a week of playing with one, i managed to get it to work (just by sheer will and determination, because, at the time, that’s all i had, absolutely no background in computers). well, after about week of that i decided i wanted to create my own. oh boy. i learned that this cgi script was written in a thing called PERL. i had no idea what that was, oh sure i knew what computer languages were, they were things for smart people with math degrees. i was neither. but, not really caring, i just said “fuck it” and locked myself in my family’s home office and spent all my spare time learning this crazy languge. it took about 6 months to finally “get it.” and even then my code was crap, but i had a working guestbook.

feeling confident in that, and it being 1995, i figured “hey i learn this new java thing.” and yeah… the rest is history.

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