About Hilton Harbour

What it is, why it's here and how it's done.

What Hilton Harbour is

Hilton Harbour is an eclectic collection, written by myself and people I know. My aim is to publish more content than either graphics which say almost nothing, let alone a thousand words, or just a list of links, which would be nothing more than meta-content. This way, I feel better about expressing strong opinions about other poeple's web sites.

Hilton Harbour, to some degree, is a personal experiment in designing and implementing a web site. This is captured by my Web Site Architecture guidelines and the Web Page Design Principles.

Why Hilton Harbour exists

Obviously, I'm hoping that each of these pages will one-day provide someone with some work-avoidance or something better to do than watch television. Perhaps less obviously, I hope that for each page in Hilton Harbour at least one person in the world will learn something new or think about a question that they have never asked themselves. Or just waste some time in a cafe somewhere.

I am also interested in content syndication and the idea of big sites mining content from independent content providers.

In any case, I enjoy writing, playing with photos and trying to do the odd illustration.

How Hilton Harbour is produced

All of the HTML on these pages was coded by hand because I have yet to use a WYSIWYG Web page editor which I like. I once tried quite a few of the popular ones, and even liked a couple, but they still were not what I want. These days, I am happy using SubEthaEdit on Mac OS X.

As well as a text editor to code the pages, I have used a variety of validators - currently the Safari Tidy plugin. Validation tools are essential.

The pages are assembled from a standard page template and a bare HTML file for the content using server-side PHP scripting.

I usually use an Apple Macintosh to create these pages and the images, because I much prefer using Mac OS to any of the variants of Microsoft Windows and none of the other alternatives are practicable for me. Sometimes I use Debian Linux at work. Anyway, it is not worth trying to explain why I use a Mac, although I suspect that anyone who had also used both Mac OS and Windows professionally for hundreds of hours or more each might be able to hazard a guess.

Also, in a recent change of heart on using graphics, I have starting using FamFamFam Silk and Flag

icons.