How I made my webpage

Chris Hulbert

http://move.to/brickwarrior

There are five sections to how the webpage was made:

HTML coding
Images
Sounds on the powerups page
Dynamic images
Uploading onto the internet at http://move.to/brickwarrior

HTML coding

The pages were initially sketched out using Netscape Composer. I became sick of Composer locking up my computer so, apart from using it for tables and lists, I ended up using notepad to edit the html files. Anything I didn't know the html tags for, I used Composer for.

Also, towards the end of the project, I installed Microsoft Frontpage Express on my computer, and began to use it. I find that it is much less buggy than Composer, easier to use and faster.

Images

The images that are used throughout the webpage have mostly been created by myself using Paint Shop Pro 5. A lot of the images have been copied across from BrickWarrior screens, and simply edited a bit in Paint Shop, then put into the webpage.

I found that when some of the screenshots were saved as JPG files, they lost a bit of image quality when you looked closely, so now all the images in the webpage are in GIF format, except for some of the background images and some images where quality is not really needed. Also, the images were saved specially so that they will load progressively, that is, they load quickly in low quality, and as more of the image downloads the quality gets better.

Sounds on the powerups page

On the powerups page, there is a table of all the powerups, what they do, and the sounds they make. The sounds come straight from the game (although they were reduced in quality to make download times faster), and here part of the HTML code that I used to put them in:

<EMBED
        SRC="powerups/slow.wav" WIDTH=50 HEIGHT=27>

Initially, when I was developing for Internet Explorer 3, it ignored the width and height specifications, and I had problems where the page looked like this, with all the descriptions at the right squashed together:

This created a problem, but when I tried the webpage at school, I noticed that I could shrink the size of the sound control bars. Now they have been fixed and take up less room, and the description column fits nicely, with the only side-effect being that if you are using Netscape, the sounds do not work, and if you are using Internet Explorer before version 4, the text is still squashed.

Dynamic images

Dynamic images are images that change when the mouse pointer is moved over them, such as on the main index page, where the links glow when you pass the mouse over them. Doing these proved to be the fiddliest part of the whole webpage.

Firstly, I had open all the link images in Paint Shop, make them glow, then save them again under a different file name. Then in the HTML for the page, the following code had to be put (I have shortened it down here):

<script language="JavaScript">

function swtch(num, imgname) {
document[imgname].src = img[num].src;
}

imgsrc = new Array();
imgsrc[0] = "whatis_on.gif";
imgsrc[1] = "whatis.gif";

img = new Array();
for (i = 0; i < imgsrc.length; i++) {
img[i] = new Image();
img[i].src = imgsrc[i];
}

</script>

The code has the problem that, again, under Internet Explorer 3 it will not work, and will actually generate an annoying error.

Uploading onto the internet

Firstly my friend helped me by getting me a website on Tripod, and then he figured out a way of getting http://move.to/brickwarrior as a shorter name for my page (it was initially https://members.tripod.com/~Brickwarrior which is a lot to remember).

I use a program called WS FTP to upload my website to the internet. This program is an FTP client, and allows me to upload my webpage to the Tripod server, where it is stored.

The biggest problem that I have encountered with uploading my webpage is the time that it takes, especially in Internet prime-time (just when school is out for the day) when my internet connection slows down markedly. To do a full upload of the page requires about 20 minutes, so to combat this I usually only upload small parts at a time (if I have only made a few small changes to the site then this becomes worthwhile). The only problem with this method is that sometimes I cannot be sure the whole website has been uploaded properly, and that I may have missed uploading a page that I have edited.