Technology

These pages will provide some background on the history of The Carrier Project and will describe some of the conventions used throughout the site.

Hardware

The original - and extremely crude - version of The Carrier Project was written on an old Unisys 386DX25 that barely deserved to be called a computer. The operating system was MS-DOS 6.22, with Windows 3.1 overlaid.

It has since been replaced by a 300 MHz Pentium II that has been massively upgraded. The current operating system is Windows 98, although I plan to upgrade to WindowsXP in the near future.

Update (January 2006): The old Pentium II has been replaced by an AMD Sempron system - big, fast, powerful, wow!!!

Update2 (August 2007): I apparently took a power spike or something that fried the Sempron. A new motherboard, mounting dual AMD Athalon processors, has been installed. Ho-lee buckets!

Software

Many programs were used to assist in writing this site. I should note that I hold a degree in computer programming, and I prefer to code by hand. Automated code generators have always annoyed me - they have no style. Also, by writing the code manually, the programmer knows exactly what is happening at all points in the program. This makes troubleshooting and modification much easier and more efficient.

The lists below identify most of the software I used. Any links presented are for the current versions of the software, not necessarily the version I have.

File Management

Any software project (and website development is a software project; don't let anybody tell you any different) requires file management. You can't design and execute a project until you can keep track of your resources. I have used two file managers during the development of this site:

Pathminder 4.0: An MS-DOS file utility by Westlake Data of Austin, Texas. Similar to the current ACDSee Classic.

ACDSee 2.43: Although intended as a graphics manager, ACDSee is an excellent Windows file manager, much better than that included with Windows. ACD Systems

is located in British Columbia, Canada.

Text Editing

The basic editing was done on a variety of text editors and word processors. These included:

Pathminder 4.0: Mentioned above. PM had an internal text editor with some limited formatting and search-and-replace functions.
WordStar 5.0: An MS-DOS wordprocessor by MicroPro. Well-featured for it's time. I still use it, since I prefer it's sorting capabilities.

Notepad: This is the Windows internal default text editor. No formatting capabilities, no automated functions, and a rather annoying 64k file size limit.
NoteBook 2.4: A shareware text editor similar to Notepad, but without the 64k limit. Notebook was written and distributed by C.T. Software of Elk Grove, Illinois. Unfortunately, C. T. Software appears to no longer exist.
WordPad: The wordprocessor integral to Windows 98.
Xchange 2.2.3: A project of this size often requires that text changes be made to many files simultaneously. The easiest way to do this is with an automated utility. I tried several before settling on Xchange, a shareware program. It is easy to use, inexpensive, and it allows the user to specify many changes and will execute them all at the same time. It's configuration file is user-editable, another plus. Xchange is by Simon Armstrong's Sadman Software

.
Img2HTML 1.1: This is a neat little freeware utility by Alan Balding

that will automatically generate basic IMG tags for your HTML files. I found it at BigNoseBird

, an online HTML tutorial site.

Graphics Editing

My graphics were all created or modified using Paint Shop Pro 3.12-32

by JASC of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, which was included on a CD-ROM that came with my copy of "Dummies 101Ž: HTML" by Eric and Deborah Ray.

I also used the freeware RGB/Hex Color Selector

utility by Perry S. Pennington to select some of the colors used in the images or backgrounds. I found this utility at BigNoseBird.com.

An excellent reference to assist in selecting web-safe colors is Doug Jacobsen's RGB Hex Color Chart

.

The little logo icon (up there, top of the screen, next to the web address; looks like this:

) was created by running a U. S. Navy photograph

of CVN-74 USS John C. Stennis through the online Favicon creation utility

at Chami.com, home of HTML-Kit.

The gradients used in highlights and backgrounds were created using the Multipoint Color Gradient Generator

by Richard A. DiVenzia or the online gradient generator at GradColor.com

Web Browsers & Testing

Most testing was done using my default web browser, Netscape

. Some testing was also done with Internet Explorer

and Mozilla Firefox

. (Note: I have since made FireFox my default browser)

IncludeHTML

by Jesper Rosenlund Nielsen was originally used to test the many Server-Side Includes statements that were used throughout the site. However, since my current host, GrandeCom.Net, does not enable Server-Side Includes, I began using IncludeHTML to automate the insertion of often-used code sections, such as the menu that you see on the left. This has since been superseded by the use of the IFRAME tag.

Website Management

File transfers for the website have been accomplished using WS_FTP, both the early freeware version (WS_FTP) and the current commercial program (WS_FTP Home). Information about WS_FTP can be found at Ipswitch Software

.

Occasionally, links on a website will stop working; the referenced page likely having been renamed, deleted or moved. Locating these broken links can be a pain - unless you use a utility like Xenu's Link Sleuth

. This neat little freeware utility will verify both internal and external links, report orphan files, and create an HTML site map. Highly recommended.

About The Carrier Project
General Site Organization	Page Layout	Technology
Site Conventions	General Information	The Site Refit
Images	Ship Class Data	The Site Refit (Older Notes)
Glossary: Words and Abbreviations	Individual Ship Data	List of Page Dedications