Report 2:
hp.html file
 "Canaan Machida's Home Page"


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My Home Page


Canaan Machida's Home Page
(hp.html)

Appearance

The look of my hp.html (Home Page) took actually more of my creative powers than any of my other web sites. I wanted this page to reflect not only my personality, but also to look good enough so as to be taken seriously in regard to the links I have for my other web sites for class. At first I decided to make the colors of the background, text, and links different from my other web pages. A little later, as I happened to be searching the web for icons to download, I saw a background gif of spam. I really like spam. I downloaded it and was easily able to get it into my CSS directory without any trouble. I then used it as a background and I think it looks great. The good thing about it is that the background's colors are transparent and it doesn't interfere with the readability of the page. It also loads pretty fast. Because this is a "home" page, I wanted to give it a feeling of a home. I did this by making it icon and image heavy. There is only as much text as is needed and the eye-bars I use add a nice touch to the appearance. I was able to do this using small sized icons (1 to 2 K) which all load fairly quickly.
The basic appearance of this page hasn't changed much from when I finished it in March. I use the same Spam background, and the icons are all still the same. This page seems to need to stay the same. If I change anything drastically in this page, it wouldn't feel like my "home page."

Content

At first, I was unsure about what the content of this hp.html file should consist of. It wasn't until about last week when Dr. James told us to take our Report links out of our wibx.html files and put them in our hp.html files. He also specified that our hp.html must be like a table of contents for all our web sites. Now that I have a plan, I am ready to go.
First, I wrote my welcome to make everyone well, feel welcome. I placed my class links first since they're the most important. My reports came next. I happened to see Denise Tanaka's Home Page and saw how she used an gif to inform anyone entering her page what was new and when she had updated it. I took this idea (and gif) and used it in my Home Page to indicate how current my reports were. I also used an gif to indicate that these Report 2 files were empty. Of course they're not empty anymore. With links to extra stuff like My Favorite Internet News Stuff and My Favorite Search Engines located at the bottom of my hp.html page, I feel as if this Home Page is really my home away from home.

Structure

Making links are always hard. It's not only hard, it's also very time consuming. At first I was thinking about putting all each individual "netsufer report" and each search engine I had into my hp.html page. But when I looked at other peoples home pages and saw that it was very general in its links, I then decided to create extra files and place this extra stuff in there. I made two, one for my News and one for my Search Engines. The only problem is now that although I think I've solved a problem, I've also at the same time created more work for myself. Although these pages aren't necessary in terms of my class, it is important to everyone who visits my Home Page and expects to see well maintained intermediate and extra web pages. Now that this Home Page is nice and tidy, I have to go and work on my others.
The only new additions, structurally speaking, is the new link utilizing Netscape 2.0's frame splitting method. As discussed in my Report 2-My wib14.html site, I feel as if this new method greatly enhances the performance of not just this web page, but my entire web site.

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by Canaan Machida
Spring 1996
Psychology 409-G3
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
cmachida@hawaii.edu