spamtrap

Web (and other) Site Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you have a '.org' domain? Isn't that for non-profit organizations?

Short answer: .org was the best fit.

Long answer: The Internet is a hard place for a person to get along. . .

Domain ID:D56502700-LROR Domain Name:WRONKA.ORG Created On:01-Feb-2001 11:52:31 UTC

Above is part of the whois information available for wronka.org. Notice that the domain was created on the first of February, 2001. Let us look at what other possible domains were available at that time.

The Available Options

.COM was assigned for commercial entities, businesses and the like. This wasn't an accurate classification.

.NET was for network infrastructure--something I'd hardly consider myself and my dialup speeds.

Domains not Available

.US would be the best choice, but was not available for another year. .Name was also not available, and during at least its first few years did not offer an economical incentive. It cost the same as any other generic domain, but provided less. For instance, now I have matt.wronka.org and riss.wronka.org. This would require two different registrations in .Name had that even been a possibility.

I'm not sure when the .WS domain opened to the general public. Some people have suggested this as an option. I am not a citizen of Western Samoa, and as such, do not feel that their ccTLD would be valid.

If I were here to register again today, I'd possibly consider a .US domain as the best choice—but that wasn't three years ago. As you can see, .org was the only real choice. (As a side benefit, I'm told it bypasses some WWW filters ...)

Why does it look so hideous?

I have always tried to keep this page accessible, and informational over style. Pesonally, I'd always rather have more information in an easily parsable form than less information in a very pretty ribbon. I find that if I spend my time making everything look magically pretty, I don't have that time to make things more useful, or create things that I wish existed. I'll leave the styling to people who enjoy that more.

See also the entry on the colour scheme

Why grey? (alternatively: Why gray?)

Because it's the default colour of my web browser—classic Netscape gray.

The neutral grey is easiest on the eyes across a wide range of ambient lighting and also minimally affects the appearance of pictures.

My Web Browser Downloads a File / The Page Doesn't Display

nb: since people asking this question can't read this file, they need to use the deX translated version

Most pages on my web site are XHTML compliant. XHTML is an easier to read (parse) format than traditional HTML and is 'guaranteed' to be correct, resulting in consistent rendering. Supposedly. It shouldn't be rendered at all if there are errors.

Your browser actually said that it would accept this file as it was, and so no attempt was made to convert it. This page is available as application/xhtml+xml, the default (XHTML 1.1), or any of text/xml (XHTML 1.0) text/html (HTML 4) or text/plain. If you can only handle a subset of these types, please fix your browser to correctly do content negotiation (or demand that your vendor fix the browser).

Chances are, your browser is too old or otherwise out of date. Known problem children are MSIE and Links. I can provide a patch for Links that will force it to render the pages, or you can just use w3m which already does that. If you use MSIE you're SOL. Then again, you're using a browser its own maker has basically told you not to use ...

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