Brothers

—reminds me of my brother and me...

Here are some of the places and people which for one reason or another assist or inspire me in some way. I hope you will check them out.

One of my favorite inspirations is the work and writing of Eric Meyer. His home site is Meyerweb.com. His book Eric Meyer on CSS is a thoroughly readible and useful text for someone wanting to learn how to make web pages that look good, work well, and can be changed easily. Mr. Meyer is an evangelist for standards based web design, and a pioneer in styling html with cascading style sheets. Style sheets are a set of commands which tell a particular web site how to look and behave. By treating layout and content seperate, designers and plain folks like me, enablke you to bring simplicity to your web site's structure. In the early days of the web, designers had to code styling instructions for any every element that had a special color, look, or margin setting — thoughout the whole site. In other words, if a designer wanted to make the links on a site green, then he or she had to put little tags on either side of every link in the site telling that link to be green. On a large site with a lot of links, that meant writing this: 

<a href="wwww.somelink.com color="green"> somelink</a>

around every link throughout the site. Style sheets, among other things, permitted the designer to say "hey, site, look at this one page of intructions that I'm putting in this folder, and it will tell you what color all the links will be and a whole lot of other stuff." When the page behaves properly, all the links are green, the disigner has eliminated a whole lot of code, and making changes later on will be a whole lot easier.

Clark Thomas is the best photographer (yes, out of all photographers). His philosophy about the value of portraits and the importance of being a contributing part of my community is a big influence. His portfolio goes back 40 years or more and would impress even the snobbiest conniseur of photography, but impressing is not something in which he is interested (unless he is impressing a point of learning). You can see his portrait work here: Clark Thomas' simplephotographs.com.

The community of local Macusers was one of the very first MacIntosh Computer usergroups. Despite its nerdy sounding premise, this organization has been a source of great info, humor, and good will for morte than twenty years (gasp!). Visitors are always welcome, and the web site is super useful for a Mac user.

The good people at Chromatics process slide film and a whole lot more. I could not have made this web site without the amazing resources that can be found at The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3 for short. I suppose it is the über geek user group. The aspect of this site that I love is that it is created in a spirit of knowledge and teaching that will remind you, if you forgot, or show you, if you did not know, that the World Wid Web is a treasure that belongs to all of us.

You can find the tutorials on HTML and Cascading Style sheets (CSS) to which I referred heavily in during the process of making this site. I can't thank them (especially Dave Raggett) enough.