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About this homepage
The official stuff, you know...
Some open words
I like the idea of OpenSource. As a result, nearly everything on my
homepage is OpenSource stuff, what means that you can take it, use it, change it, whatever, for free. However, don't do
something with it that makes me upset. If a document or a program or something like this on my homepage features some
kind of license, it might be a good idea to read it.
Here are some OpenSource related documents that are always good to know (they might even be useful for you, if you are going to publish your work):
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Some technical words
My domain, manuel.kiessling.net, runs on a Linux server, using
Apache. Most pages are static, but some are dynamic, written in
PHP.
I recently added two new modules to my Apache configuration:
mod_speling
attempts to correct misspellings of URLs that users might have entered, by ignoring capitalization and by allowing up to one misspelling.
For example you could now enter 'http://manuel.kiessling.net/Aboutt/' without getting a 404
error, but being redirected to this page.
mod_gzip is
another very useful Apache module. After it is installed and activated,
the pages Apache delivers to the client are no longer plain HTML files, but are compressed with the GZIP compression libraries
such as ZLIB. The client decompresses this data after receiving it and the original plain file is
available again. This way, a common HTML file can be compressed by up to 90%, thus reducing traffic and server load, and significantly reducing the time a client needs
to receive a file, consequently providing a faster surfing experience. Older webclients (pre-1999) that cannot decompress the compressed pages automatically get uncompressed
pages, thus no extra software is necessary.
The documents
(web pages) are created as XML files and transformed into HTML and other formats using XSL templates.
All this is handled by a tool I wrote for myself, QuickHP.
The current release is already old and does not reflect the current capabilities of QuickHP, but I have no time to create a well-coded new release - take my homepage as a demo for what is possible with QuickHP.
If you stumble across some pages with a dark yellow background and an overall not-so-nice look: those are pages I had
not yet time to transfer to the new XML format. Pages that look (subjectively) cleaner and fresher, like the one you currently read: these are the new pages.
The use of XML and XSL enables me to present the same content in different flavors. Currently, I have a standard HTML+CSS layout (like this one) and a very basic, plain HTML layout optimized for text browsers, blind people, and printers (like this one). If I have time left, I will create a useless but nice grafic/Flash/JavaScript layout, just to show what is possible.
If you like numbers, take a look at the access log statistic of my homepage, or the phpSysInfo page of this server.
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A word about design vs accessibility
The design (or better: the absence of design) of this page is loosely based on
The GNU/FSF Web Site Guidelines.
'Loosely based on' means that some guides that don't make sense to me (or that i'm too lazy to take care of) are not used
- e.g. the guide to never use index.html as a real file.
The only target of this page is to present information, not to present style - therefore I decided to present the
pages in the most simple way. And because I want that these information are accessible for everyone out there, I did
three things:
Because I am of the very strong opinion that the Internet as a whole should be accessible to anyone, i ask you urgently
to do the same! You could be the next sitting in front of a linuxbox and trying to reach an important site with
Lynx.
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