I was just surfing around LiSP when I came across your page - and I noticed the problem with the fonts.

When there was a problem with my page and nobody told me, I was disappointed.

Although I have the Verdana fonts installed, most of your page shows up in Times New Roman... even the headings...

If I take out the words Italic and Bold, it comes up in all Verdana...

Is it okay on your Browser? (Apparently it was okay, but only in Netscape Navigator 4)

I experimented a lot... with capitalisation... and with inverted commas...

What I came up with was that it doesn't seem to recognise the Bold and Italic as part of the 'font face'... however, you should be able to use the tags for italic and bold...

I asked because apparently your font commands worked in whatever you were using... and I had tried your page IE 3.01 and in Netscape 3... so wondered what you could be using...

BUT... when I collected your mail in Internet Explorer 3.01, I was able to click on your email address to reply, or web page address to go to it... it comes up in blue and underlined like a hypertext link on the Web... but it doesn't seem to work the same way in Eudora... I've just been sending messages to myself to test it!

I found out that although it is not in blue, and not underlined, it does work in Eudora, but requires a double click rather than a single click.

Why didn't you tell me that my fancy messages didn't show up fancy in Eudora??

In Internet Explorer's Mail program, this would be in big blue type!

Do you realise that not everyone will have the Mead Bold font installed... and they will see your pages in plain Times New Roman if they haven't chosen a different default font...??

You can specify any number of fonts to try... as far as I know, the browser will use the 'first available' one on each computer...

I didn't have Mead Bold until the a few days ago. I also didn't have the one you used before - Tempus Sans ITC.

When I first looked at the page, it used Times New Roman... when I returned (to the saved file) the other day, it looked completely different even though the source hadn't changed - it was the same file.... but it showed up in the Mead Bold font.

About Net Attache Light: it's an offline reader. You run it, putting in the address you want... and the program 'grabs' the site for you to look at later... you can continue surfing while it collects...

There are some things with which I agree...: I won't be using any under construction signs... and I won't be providing outside links... for now, anyway.

Last week I said to my kids that if people came to my pages, I wanted them to stay, not run off somewhere else!

I am also experimenting a lot with graphics to keep the files small.

My daughter wants a counter like the one on your page. When I saw that it was 37.8Kb I decided to try to make it smaller. I succeeded - and thought you might be interested... 37.8Kb takes a while to load! COUNTER5.GIF (attached) is 13.4Kb.

I've fiddled with the rock and rockline to reduce the file sizes. See attached rocks2.gif and rock2.gif

These are simply reduced from 256 colours to 16 colours, giving a slight difference in quality, but substantial difference in file size.

How did I achieve the file size reduction: I loaded the GIF into Paint Shop Pro and saved as JPG - with a fairly high compression level.

A lot of the graphics on my pages came from the Internet. I've done about 120 hours of surfing... or 'fishing'!!?

That 120 hours was during the first 3 or 4 months...

All of the family favourites, and most of the Simpsons, were collected from the Net...

Some graphics came with my trial version of MS Publisher. When it stopped working, the graphics and fonts were still there.

Then there are my CDs full of clipart: Desktop Publishers Dream Disk; Clipart Wharehouse; Publisher Platinum; and others.

I'm not an artist... the only 'graphic' (on my pages) which I made is the animated text - the its and it's...

I've been collecting clipart for years... even before I got my first CD ROM drive in July 1992. All the clipart then was B&W... and that was fine for a dot matrix printer.

For the Internet (and colour printers) colour is nice... so I'm searching and collecting all over again.

Animations have been taken from pages on the Net too. Some people have collections of animations. See http://www.lisp.com.au/~leah for Leah's 'Plantation of Animations'

A couple of weeks ago I found animations on a CSIRO page - but when I went back yesterday to check the address for you, the animations had disappeared.

Once you have your graphics, it's possible to edit them. 256 colour GIF files can be reduced in size by decreasing the number of colours, often without loss of quality. JPG (good for photos) can have the compression level changed... Animations can have some frames removed... I'm learning all the time...

The bears on my page came from Desktop Publishers Dream Disk. To have the page background come right up to the bears' outlines, they had to be given transparent backgrounds. But first, some editing. As they were, the background would have run into the bears as the outlines had 'gaps' in them.

So I filled in all the gaps. Then saved them as 16 colour GIFs. 2 colours wouldn't be enough - as an extra colour was needed for the transparent parts...

Kate's Easter picture (which is not on her page now - only here) came from the same CD. Again, the gaps had to be filled in. Then she coloured it in... in PaintshopPro.

I've been testing the business cards in Netscape - and the differences have been driving me crazy!!

The worst one was that the invisible border in Internet Explorer - around a graphic - became a coloured border in Netscape... there were other differences... I hope I've allowed for them all.

As you'll see in my 'Notebook', I've found differences between the browsers.

When I first put up our pages, Kate's Simpsons page wouldn't display in Netscape. Internet Explorer forgave the mistake we'd made, (leaving a < off the Title tag) and displayed the page. Netscape printed the first couple of lines of HTML as text... then nothing...

At least one of my friends knew there was a problem... but didn't tell me. I was disappointed... when I see problems on people's pages I tell them... to avoid further embarrassment by not having things quite right.

The graphics aren't mine... although some are edited by me... and yes, the kitten was meant to go backwards on Chrissy's page...

I knew that the photo album background (and the Notebook background) would tile on 1024 by 768... but I didn't think many people would use that... and I wanted to keep the file size down... (21 May 1998... I've changed the backgrounds... they should not tile on 1024 by 768 now)

I can't even use 800 by 600 on mine... too much flickering... gives me a headache...

Kate's ant behaves differently in different browsers... I edited him the other night... and think he's okay now.

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