"Best Viewed With any Browser"

¶ Every once in a while I get a kind suggestion, by a well meaning soul, as to how I might "Update" or "Modernize" my Web Site.

Sometimes it is from an Old Hand at web design. One good gentleman, who had quite a pedigree, suggested I make the fonts (words) bigger because it was hard for him to read the words on the site. When I asked him what resolution he had his monitor set at he said his 21 inch monitor (Quite big for the time) was set at something like 2560x1600. The cure? Cut down the ridiculous size of your screen resolution.

I usually set my pages for around 850-900 pixels in width and Font 4 in size because the majority of monitors will read the page well at this resolution and letter size. I use the Tahoma font as everyone says this font is easiest to read on a computer. As monitors get bigger this may change.

Several college students, majoring in web design, have kindly offered to "Update" the site to a more modern look. The offers are generous and sincerely meant to help, so I always go and look at the more modern examples they give of their work. Slow loading, lots of Adobe Flash. Strange, to say the least, site navigation. Like this " ≡ " symbol called, believe it or not, a Hamburger Button.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Need I go on? I'm sure they are getting A's in state of the art, cutting edge, Web Design. However, the people trying to fix up an old bike to ride, so they can save money or give their kids a fun ride, can't afford new, cutting edge, computer equipment every year.

Consider something else. I just read an article that said there are still 10 million people in the USA on dial-up. Not everyone has super fast T1 Internet Connection. I have Satellite Internet which is a lot faster then Dial-up but some of these fancy pages are still agonizingly slow to load.

I don't worry as much as I used to about how big the page, in Kilobytes, is. Back when I was on Dial-up I held the pages to 50 KB or so but that means no or very small pictures. I don't worry about that anymore because everyone has a lot faster connection to the Internet now-a-days. This page is about 700 KB. The size of this page without the pictures is about 8 KB.

Supposedly, depending on who you talk to, the average internet speed, in 2015, worldwide, is 24.3 Mbps. If my pages load OK on my computer I figure I am good to go. My current download speed is about 3.24 Mbps which is not all that fast. Seems fast to me after using Dial-up. However, the size of a web page does need to be considered.

The offers are still well meaning but I politely turn them down.

I code everything I put up in NotePad. I test in Pale Moon, Firefox, Internet Explorer and sometimes Opera and Chrome. I look at some of these "Modern" web sites filled with ads up and down the sides and across the top... Yuck! I understand the desire to get Revenue from your site and all, but really, things have gotten out of hand.

Most of these sites are made with an HTML coding program of some kind. They add a lot of excess code that is basically useless. These programs are not for me. I think they limit you under the guise of making things easier but, perhaps, that is just me.

I immensely like the way my site looks and feels. It is FREE. Lots of good, reliable, easy to get information. Easy on the eyes, easy to navigate and even a few bells and whistles thrown in to boot. If I am the only person in the world who likes it, well, I can live with that. Did I mention it is FREE?

If you have a suggestion you can still E-mail me and I will read and consider it. I really will. I am not just saying that. I will read and consider it. Please just remember. Today does not look real good for me changing anything. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Now for all you readers who just have to have a State-of-the-Art web experience you can do this. Go find a dog, it does not have to be Pure-Breed, and get a small piece of dog excitement. Use a nitrile glove and just smear a line of poop across the top of your screen and the sides. There you go. My site will now look like all the Up-to-Date, Modern, Cutting-Edge, College approved sites out there. Not only that, you now have what all the State-of-the-Art people want most... Smell-a-Vision!

UPDATE 2018

Well, I've been getting more and more E-Mails from people on their Mobile Phones. Seems most of the younger generation love their Mobile Phones. They text. They surf. They run their "Apps". But they don't talk much. No not much. Now the big problem with Cell Phones is that they are not, big that is. Now I think you need a nice big screen to view all the detail of my pictures and easily read all the brilliance that I am trying to impart to you regarding Motorcycle Repair. However, I am an old fuddy duddy and I use my phone to talk on, not look at.

So, anyway, I find all is not bad in this brave new world of tiny Mobile, Cell Phone Screens. It appears the ads boxes and other steer manure on the edges of your average web page have to be stacked under the main content to be viewed by your typical Mobile Phone. Add to that the ability of the cell phone to be right in your hand while you work on your motorcycle. I like all that. OK, I'm in. All I have to do is make my pages Mobile Phone Friendly. How easy, what could possibly go wrong?

So I start my research. I Googled "Make web pages mobile phone friendly". I find out, very quickly, that you do this with CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets. I also find out there are literally hundreds of "Experts" out there filling up the web with helpful advise and examples of CSS code. There is only one problem. How do I put this gently? Surprise! None of their code works.

I did not see that one coming. Perhaps all this might be understandable. When I first learned HTML back in 1999 Frames were all the rage on the web. I never liked them and I never used them but a lot of people did use them. Then came CSS. Although released in late 1996 it took CSS a few years to get going. CSS is actually a very good way to change the setup of a lot of different web pages quickly. It works like this. A text file is made in Notepad and saved as a CSS file. The text in this file specifies the size, color, placement, and many other attributes of the web page. This can be activated on a web page in one of two ways. With all your code inside a style tag or with a link to the CSS file.

The big benefit from all this is that you can change the set up of all pages that have a CSS link with just a change in the CSS file. Quite handy I suppose, if you change the setup of your pages often. However, I don't change my pages very often so I sort of ignored the CSS revolution. Also, when CSS really became popular I already had fifty or sixty pages up and it would have taken a lot of work to change them. All for no real reason. Now I have a reason.

So a lot of the CSS code and advice I've been looking at is five or eight or ten years old. That is an age and a half old on the web. Almost pre-Hillary. Yes! That old, dilapidated and infirm. Web design has moved on to a new level of dog poopyness. We now have all kinds of web design programs with all kinds of Squirrelly code, but that's not my problem. My problem is making my web pages Mobile Phone friendly, right?

So I started looking at all the different codes all the so-called experts said would work. None of them worked. So I looked at the source code for their web pages and the pages were all made with some kind of program and NOT with the code they posted on their web sites. Makes me wonder if these experts ever actually used the code they supposedly wrote.

Now I did figure out that one code "@media" would make every attribute within that tag's funny little brackets, { for start and } for end, only applicable to a Mobile Phone Browser. However, not all the attributes I tried would work right. Most all of my web pages are just several small tables within one big table. That should be easy to make mobile. But no. I tried dozens of different codes and hundreds of different attributes and then BANG one small set of codes worked. At least on some mobile browsers. Here another problem popped up.

Testing this stuff is a nightmare. Mozilla tells us that there are something like 286 different screen sizes on Mobile Phones and tablets out there, not to mention something like ten or twelve different Mobile Browsers out there too. To top it off you have to put the coded pages up on the web to test them. So I put the code I want to try up on a web page and try it out by viewing it on an old smart phone I have. If it does not work as I want it to I then change one and only one thing, put it up and see if that worked. Do this a million or so times... OK, maybe only five or six hundred times... and I finally get the code to work. However, it only seems to work in the FireFox mobile browser. So I search and stumble upon a big snippet of code that is in the public domain. I add that to my CSS mix and Voila, it starts to work in FireFox, Chrome and every other mobile browser I try. Even on an I-Phone.

WOW, what a pain but now I have a CSS code that seems to work nicely in most if not all mobile phones. Now I enclose all of my web pages in one big table. That seems to work very well with my CSS code. If you have web page of your own and want to make it Mobile Phone friendly simply get my Screen.CSS file and put it in your root directory. Then, in the Head of your webpage document, put the following:

If you did everything right, your web page will now read right on a Mobile Phone. It may help you to look at the source code for this web page too.

Just one depressing thing more. Google has a page that will supposedly tell you if your web page is Mobile Friendly. I found during all my testing that this Google tool read some pages as Mobile Friendly when they were very clearly not Mobile Friendly and some pages as not Mobile Friendly when they were very obviously Mobile Friendly. Google your Mobile Friendly tool is JUNK!

Opera Chrome

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