About this Site

What's Here?

The WordSmyth Film Website is intended as a resource for persons interested in film studies.  As the site was designed and constructed by me, the site obviously reflects my interests and ideas.  As such, I have placed online most of my articles on film studies, as well as short and medium-length film reviews.  I intend to put more movie reviews and film articles on my Movie Website, including other published and unpublished works.

If you are interested in Technical Writing, Literature, or Poetry, please visit my main WordSmyth Website at:  http://lverburg.home.mindspring.com/.

Another Website I designed from scratch and currently maintain is the Website of the Savannah River Site Chapter of the National Management Association at:  http://www.nma1.org/chapters/773/.

How Was It Built?

Although my Website is fairly low-tech, it is optimized for viewing at a resolution of 600 X 800, on both Netscape Navigator 4.x and Internet Explorer 5.x. I have not created a cascading style sheet for this site, though I have on others I have designed. The primary reason for this is that Netscape Navigator 4.6 makes such a sorry hash of css, that they are almost unusable. Shame, shame, Netscape! How the mighty have fallen! For this reason I switched and now use Internet Explorer exclusively. I make use of transparent images, tables, and other standard items, plus Java scripts (for banners). In the old days (1996), I used Arachnophilia, a freeware HTML editor, and LViewPro, a shareware image viewer/editor to build this site. Though it has very limited functionally, I still use and recommend Arachnophilia, at least for simple jobs. You can get Arachnophilia from http://www.arachnoid.com/ or download it from Tucows at http://tucows.mcp.com/. Unfortunately, Arachnophilia cannot even begin to compete with Dreamweaver or even FrontPage.

In the past, I used Microsoft's Picture It, a very simple to use photo program that provides good results. I now use Paint Shop Pro (Version 6.01) for developing and editing Web images; it's a full-featured shareware/retail program from Jasc Software that is available for download from Tucows and other sources. I have decided to migrate to either Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage 2000. I downloaded a demo version of FrontPage several years ago, but was not overly impressed with the product. I have been informed by reliable sources, however, that the 2000 version is quite good.

I originally decided to develop a Website in the early fall of 1996, but, until an unexpectedly long hiatus between contract jobs gave me some freedom (I'm a technical writer), I never seemed to have the time. Finally, in the winter of 1996/1997, I bought two very good books on HTML and began developing my Website.  The two books that helped me considerably were:

(1) The second edition of Laura Lemay's Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.0 in a Week (Sams.net Publishing, 1996).  Despite the ridiculous title, Lemay's book is really quite good, though way dated now.  A new edition covering HTML 4.0 was out in bookstores in mid-December of 1997.  I don't know about HTML 4.1—anyway, the main difference between HTML 4.0 and 4.1 is the required use of cascading style sheets (css).  THE book on style sheets, which I have indeed purchased, and can recommend, is Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos, Cascading Style Sheets, Designing for the Web, 2nd Ed. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1999. ISBN: 0-201-59625-3.  As for Ms. LeMay, you can check out her books at "Laura's Web Zone":  http://www.lne.com/Web/.

(2) The second edition of Ian S. Graham's HTML Sourcebook, A Complete Guide to HTML 3.0 (Wiley Computer Publishing, 1996), was a really good reference book, but it was relegated to the trash can early this year (2000).  (In Internet years it was rather long in the tooth.)  A third, revised edition of Graham's book covering HTML 3.2 was out in early 1997, but I don't know about HTML 4.0 and 4.1.  You can check out Graham's and other computer books at:  http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/.

To replace the by-now guillotined Lemay and Graham books, I purchased (October 1998) another source book on HTML 4.0 by Mark Brown and Jerry Honeycutt, Using HTML 4, Fourth Edition (Que Corporation, 1998).  This is a fairly comprehensive book of over 1,000 pages that I was once happy about but that has seriously disappointed me of late.  Though the HTML is fairly comprehensive, if a tad dated, its index is difficult to use, and some of the examples are really bad.  Chapters on creating and publishing Web Pages, includes chapters on Dynamic HTML (DHTML); adding JavaScript, VisualBasic Script (VBS), and CGI scripting; serving multimedia content; and the art of Web Site management are so bad I can't recommend the book.  There is a new edition that may address some of the book's more obvious deficiencies, but I lack the energy or desire to find out.  Instead, I would recommend downloading the free, definitive versions of HTML 4.0 and 4.1, which are available in Adobe Acrobat's portable document format (pdf) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at:  http://www.w3.org/TR/.

For general information and Web Page design in particular, I used several sources that are, sadly, defunct (Net Magazine and Windows Sources).  Of those entities that survive, PC Magazine was also quite helpful.

In 1998, I found a number of books on the art of Web Page development, and, if you can find them, they are still worth a look—the principles of Web design that they espouse are still timely and useful: (1) Creating Killer Web Sites by David Segel (Hayden Books, 1996); be careful with this one, as it can sometimes be a bit over the top, (2) Deconstructing Web Graphics: Web design Case Studies and Tutorials by Lynda Weinman (New Riders Publishing, 1996), and (3) Web Concept and Design: A Comprehensive Guide for Creating Effective Web Sites by Crystal Waters (New Riders publishing, 1996).  Though not as fatally defunct as the HTML books, these books are very old by Internet standards.