About this site

What's Here

Here we have a hodge-podge of material accumulated from my 25+ years on the web. There is not a single cohesive theme. Here are some of the things you'll find:

While I was in school my website accumulated a variety of materials related to my classes. Some of that material lingers here still.
As a lay leader in The Salvation Army I wrote about and for the various activities I was involved in there. A large portion of this site consists of those pages.
Another group of material was written with my family and friends in mind. Some of these stories and photos might be interesting to others.
During the time I worked as a programmer and systems administrator I sometimes stuck things that were useful to me in that environment on my website -- often when I was working on something from home and didn't have a connection to the servers at the office. It was never proprietary or sensitive material. It is unlikely to be of interest to anyone else but there may be a few scraps of that stuff lying about here.
Finally, some of this is just stuff that I found interesting and I wanted to write about it.

Colophon

Markup

I taught myself to write HTML when [HTML 4.0] was new, and that became the format I used for virtually all of my writing thereafter.

[HTML 4.0] (https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-html40-971107/)

In the summer of 2022 I discovered a much simpler and more enjoyable way to write: using a lightweight markup language called ["Gemtext"]. Not only is it easier to write, but the accompanying transport protocol is much simpler. This makes pages much faster to load, in many cases more easy to read, and less likely to become cluttered with all the things that have bloated the HTML/CSS/JavaScript web. Along the way I've discovered that there is a community of writers who are also enjoying the simplicity of this baby sibling of the web. Much of the excitement and hope that I remember from the early days of the web in the mid-1990s are now seen again among this group.

[Gemtext] via Gemini (gemini://geminiprotocol.net/)

[Gemtext] on the Web (https://geminiprotocol.net/)

Editor

For a long a long time I used the Tilde editor, but it hasn't been maintained recently so I switched to the Fresh editor.

The Tilde Text Editor (https://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde/)

Fresh -- A powerful terminal text editor and IDE. (https://getfresh.dev)

HTML conversion

If you're reading this using a regular web browser (using HTML/HTTP) it is because I have a simple script running on the server that generates the required HTML on the fly from the Gemtext source document. I still use more complex HTML for a few pages where it is the better choice, but almost all my HTML content has been converted to Gemtext and the old HTML versions of those pages are being phased out. The stylesheet is deliberately simple, using only the basic color keywords of the CSS3 specification. It uses only six of the sixteen colors: black, gray, silver, white, navy, and maroon.

CCS3 Basic Color Keywords (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-3/#html4)

History

The first pages on my site appeared in 1996, but the oldest version available via the WayBack Machine is from February 1999.

James Card (https://web.archive.org/web/19990220094503/http://home.inreach.com/jdcard/)

That original site was hosted for free by my ISP. When they were bought by another company (which was followed a few months later by that company being sold to an even larger one) I moved my site in 2007 to a paid hosting provider and registered my own domain name.

Many of those old pages still live on here, often with very little change other than upgrading from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4 and then to XHTML 1.1 and now to Gemtext. A few have been edited along the way, and a few have been deleted -- most of them live on, for a few even when they may not match my current thinking about their content.

⋯

🗡️ spartan://jdcard.com:3300/ (spartan://jdcard.com:3300/)

🛰️ gemini://jdcard.com/ (gemini://jdcard.com/)

🌐 http://jdcard.com/ (http://jdcard.com/)

🔍 Search this site (gemini) (gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/site-search/s/jdcard.com/)