On Thu, 9 Mar 2017 08:16:20 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:


Mrs.E. brought up the subject of the old "boats of rec.boats" website
this morning over coffee. Surprisingly, it still exists although not in
the original, complete form. Still, a lot of old names from the past.

When I first created the original website (back in a kinder, more
friendly rec.boats time) the packaged website creation software used
today didn't exist. Everything was done in html code which I learned
from visiting other websites and viewing the "source" code. Shuda been
a hacker. :-)

I remember my computer at the time was a Laser Pal 286 with a 40mb hard
drive with a "high speed" 2400 baud modem. The rec.boats participants
would email me a picture and description of their boat and I'd call up
the code for the website page that was stored on the hard drive and
insert the code to add the person and picture(s) to the list. I'd then
have to upload the entire website code just to add the person. No
method existed to simply add to the current, published code. With a
2400 baud modem each addition to the list took about an hour to do and
upload to publish. The other problem was that I had no way of viewing
what the page looked like until I published it, so if I screwed
something up I had to inspect the html code to see what was wrong, fix
it, and then upload the whole damn thing again. Times have sure
changed. Now you can just drop a picture into a pre-formatted software
package, add some text, publish just the changes and be done in a minute
or so.

Here's the link to what remains of the website:

http://thebayguide.com/rec.boats/

I still edit the HTML on the 2 web sites I manage for small changes
but I do have an editor or two. I still won't use Flash or Java since
there are still people worried enough about security to have them
turned off. Flash won't run on my machines until I let it. You would
be surprised how many ads that eliminates, particularly on those
"free" sites we see.
Your browser will open an HTML directly from your hard drive as a
sanity check before you upload it. Pure HTML will open in Word, in
fact I sometimes compose pages there. Most Email ends up being an HTML
if you are doing anything more complex than flat text and I have used
the moldy old AOL 7 I run to compose simple pages. The problem with
that is you need to go in and strip out the email formatting manually
or it shows up on the web page. It only takes a minute or so tho. In
that regard an Email client or Word is as easy as any of the other
ways to get pictures with captions up on a web page.