Confessions of a Notepad User

Why do you insist upon using Notepad ?
	Don�t you want one of the latest all singing all dancing editors ?
		It must take ages to get anything done !

People just don�t understand. I use Notepad because I�m comfortable with it. The HTML I produce with it is mine and does exactly what I want it to do in a way that I understand. If I�ve done the job right the code should be generic and not depend on features available from only one browser. Now that I�ve built up a library of HTML files, my own and plagiarised, I can cut & paste to hammer together the framework of any page I want almost instantly and detailing it takes as long as the Image Editor needs to produce the pictures.

Everyone Starts Somewhere

One day in September 1996 I was surfing and found Tripod offering a free Homepage with 200K of disk space. I filled in the registration form and had to think of a suitable user name. As I had just shaved off my 20 year old beard "Unbearded" sprang to mind and the first foundation stone of my cyber being was in place before I knew it. Using the menus that came up I turned my registration form into a page with my name, home address (quickly edited out) and some links to sites I liked, all laid out with a background and a picture of a dragon in the top right corner just to add a splash of colour. The basic format for all the pages I�ve ever produced was fixed in my mind.

The original home of The Unberaded

Instantly I knew I wanted more.

I put together a WordPerfect document showing what I wanted and went to see a friend. The friend in question is a director of Cyberia Ealing who gave HTML courses lasting over six hours and costing about �120. My "course" lasted 40 minutes and cost me a couple of beers each. In a blur of mouse clicks and key strokes my document was dragged and dropped between Navigator & Notepad and HyperText Marked as I made frantic notes.

This is a link	A high quality image goes in here like this	Link a thumbnail to an image	A table will hold this into shape
<A HREF= "http://www.uti.com/ ~thekeep">			<table> <tr> <td>A table will hold this into shape</td> .-.-.-.- </tr> </table>

The indelible pattern of dna for The Unbearded was forming. Being a good teacher my man had left just enough detail work unfinished to make sure I had understood the lesson. Within a couple of days the first Unbearded�s Home Page was on line looking very like today�s offering with blue background and Cornish Tourist Board logo & link in the top left corner. All it needed now was a niche market and unique selling point.

How was Busworld created ?

A casual exchange of email with Mat Wharmby, author of The London Bus Page, was the turning point. Mat needed some photos for his page and I agreed to go out and shoot them for him. Coincidentally Tripod increased their members� space allocation to 2Megs so I was able to build a page with the pictures which I had transferred onto PhotoCD. The page was called 15Feb after the date the pictures were taken (15th February 1997) and Busworld was conceived. Having gathered up every bus picture I could find in my photographic collection and added them to the PhotoCD I wrote an index file and put that on line too. I had my niche and usp now was the time to announce myself to the world. Problem ! being a free provider Tripod has thousands of members, many of whom were already registered with major search engines to a point where people like AltaVista would not index anymore Tripod sub-directories.

What Happened Next ?

Enter once again my man from Cyberia. I was allowed to put a small file on the Cyberia server which pointed to my Tripod pages and contained links to other bus pages. This was mainly an excuse to gratuitously type words like bus, coach and London Transport as many times as possible in one document to hook Web Worms and search engines. Over the weeks more html files migrated to Cyberia and Tripod became a JPEG store, apart from the Original Home Page which always has and always will live at Tripod. This phase was generally known as "Pages at Cyberia" all copies of the HTML have been deleted.

The Birth of BusworlD

The last major revamp for 1997 saw the opening screen called Busworld for the first time. It consisted of one large JPEG acting as a mouse map to link out to everything else. Nice idea, but horribly slow to load and useless if your visitor had images turned off to save connect time.

BusworlD Today

The 1998 version of Busworld looked very similar but was conventionally constructed of many JPEGs and GIFs held in place with tables. Mr Cyberia must have been feeling exceptionally generous on the afternoon I went to put the 1998 edition of Busworld on line. Having built the whole site in a temp directory I expected to start moving the JPEGs to Tripod. I was surprised and pleased when my man dragged the whole thing into the www-root and announced that it was my round in the pub. For the first and probably only time Busworld was in one contiguous place. Dark mutterings every time I want to add anything new have caused me to revive the practice of keeping JPEGs at Tripod. I move just enough each time to make room for the new files without increasing or decreasing the amount of Cyberia space I occupy. My history of public transport from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush, From Trams to Volvos was written to be placed here at Fortune City. As annual events come past again the previous year's page will have to move to make way like Buses of Yesteryear.

Well that�s the story of Busworld. If you've stayed right to the end here are the closing credits.


	Original photographic images and electronic derivatives © Martin G. Layton 1997/8