Railride's Crossing > Table of Content > Nuts & Bolts

The place for news concerning this site in general. As if you care  >:)

1/20/2004: The Temp File becomes the File Cabinet, a dual-purpose page for dissemination of odd data files as well as relaying files that give certain mail clients problems.

1/19/2004: A long gap between updates ends with the addition of  The Temp File, for transferring bulky files that cannot be easily e-mailed to specific individuals (say, because of troublesome mail clients). The files found there will disappear once their recipient confirms they got the files.

3/08/2003: Tweaked essays and almost 3 megs of comic added to the Department of Anthromedia. Two new features "Playground to Heaven" and "Spend, Spend, Spend" added to the Theatre of the Curious. Minor HTML tweaks restore background texture to the Theatre's content.

9/11/2002: Replaced the flag on the homepage with a combined flag/WTC logo. Seems fitting.

8/27/2002: Added the feature "Adventures in Computing" to Pure Text

7/04/2002: Fixed a broken link to a page I have on Netscape's 'My Website' service (formerly sites.netscape.com)

4/23/2002: Added the features "It's not that Englehard" and "Copy Cat" to the Department of Transportation. Also added "It's Alive!" to Pure Text.

3/31/2002: Added "Engrish--Part Deux" to the "Theatre of the Curious".

02/13/2002: Corrected spelling errors in Department of Transportation-"So You Want to Build a Subway, Huh?"

02/05/2002: Re-drew and re-formatted some of the comics in 'Anthromedia'. See the 'Announcements' page there for details. More material for the 'Theatre of the Curious' is in the works.

12/06/01: Corrected a link on the WebSolo portion of the site that improperly linked back here, and added a feature to the Department of Transportation about my Schnabel freight cars

10/15/01: Completed a heavy structural revision of the site based upon the recommendations of a commercial website designer. Except for the Theatre of the Curious features, most HTML pages in the main section of the site have been grouped together in the root directory, with images formerly scattered over a variety of directories combined into three general categories. Also, most horizontal lines have been removed from menu screens, and the homepage (splash page) has been compressed to remove the need to scroll to see the rest of it, as well as making the site logo clickable. The Zcounter has been removed, since it did not provide any info on where visitors came from, and I was recieving reports that it was not working properly anyway. On the main Table of Content, all titles have been made clickable links, and link colors were unified across all three content categories. Some more non-conforming pages were also modified to conform with the site's asthetics. ConBadge 99 was tweaked to fix an obsolete link, and statements referring to a non-working home network in "Why Is This Site So Plain" have been deleted, since the network is now functional.  Links have been modified to reflect the modification of file structure in the main section, and the only thing remaining is to design a unified site logo to place atop each page. Since the entire update was composed offline and uploaded en masse, there were some anxious moments as I went hunting for broken links. Hopefully, there are none, but if anyone finds any, please email me. I will correct them as soon as I recieve the message--which won't take long since I check e-mail at least once a day.

9/20/01: Added 'Advertisements' to the Department of Transportation's "So You Want to Build a Subway?" feature.

9/18/01: Added  "Partners in Crime" to Pure Text, describing the hardware that designed this site. "All Laptops, All the Time". "Old Glory" added to the splash page, but you already saw that.

9/11/01: Yes. I saw it. From the roof of the building in The Bronx I worked at that day. I saw the cloud of dust next to the north tower after the south tower collapsed, and was watching a live shot on TV when the second tower fell.  It will continue to mess with my mind each time I replay what I saw in my mind, and each time I see the NYC skyline without those towers.

8/22/2001: Added a hit counter from Zcounter.com to the splash page and moved the WebCounter hit counter to the Department of Anthromedia. Why? Since there are three distinct types of content here, with almost no overlap of interest among those visiting this site, I decided to have seperate counters for the two highly specific areas, each provided by a different service. Only the one added to the splash page--"Railride's Crossing" includes additional visitor statistics. Also, I modified the links to the offsite hit-counter providers so that they open in seperate windows.

8/20/2001: A new feature to the Department of Transportation--an article on my new model streetcar from Western Hobbycraft, as compared to it's real-life counterpart. Also discovered that my EarthLink webspace has increased to 20 Megabytes. Holeeeee Mackerel.

7/24/2001: Added a hit counter  provided by WebSolo (the webhosting company I signed up with for the expansion of this site) to the Department of Transportation. While I was at it I added another to the main site  from WebCounter.

6/27/2001: Added "So You Want to Build a Subway, Huh?" to the WebSolo portion of the site. 800K of info designed to help a small subset of the model railroad hobby add  New York-flavored rapid-transit lines to their layouts.

6/26/2001: So I get this e-mail from EarthLink concerning a price increase. So, I'm like "well, it had to happen sometime". Then I notice where, in exchange for $2 more a month most dial-up subscribers will be paying, we're all getting seven more e-mail addresses, and our webspace allocation is being upped to 10MB. Great--I've just forked over $84 for a year of web hosting (though it's still as good as a deal as it turned out to be). I guess I won't be moving my cartoon art galleries anytime soon. Maybe I'll display my animations on the WebSolo space.

6/12/01: First content added to WebSolo-hosted section of the site. "Portable Information Archive", accessed through the Pure Text section.

5/29/01: I've signed up with WebSolo, part of A+Net.  Now I have an additional 500 megabytes to play with, at a cost of about seven bucks a month. Look for additional content under the "solo.abac.com" domain (What, you thought I was gonna get my own domain name?). But it'll still be modem-friendly.

5/26/01: I'm composing this page while riding down I-95 at 70MPH toward the Shoreline Trolley Museum, on an ancient Toshiba Portege 620CT (Pentuim 100) laptop. Goes to show how much free time I have to build the update to this site. But I persevere, carrying this, a graphics tablet and a portable scanner almost everywhere I go. Here's what's up:

--This page. Something else to read. A letter from the editor. The nitty-gritty tech (or lack of tech) behind this site
--A bunch of stuff is being updated in the AnthroMedia section. Look for tweaks to the essays and improved illustrations presiding over the character galleries.
--The link to Flash animation site Newgrounds.com now has it's own banner, supplied by the site
--A major expansion is in the works, beyond the 5MB that my ISP grants me with my account. I've finally decided to take the plunge and actually pay a few bucks for web hosting--mainly 'cause I won't tolerate ad banners and pop-ups cluttering MY webspace. Nosirree.