About

Pete Matthews Jr

3nt.xyz

This site is 100% free; I don't use cookies or capture your data. 3nt.xyz does not make any money: no donations, no ads, no money from clicks, no money from sales — any print book I sell should be at cost.

The domain name 3nt.xyz is registered with Namecheap, namecheap.com, paid up thru April 2032 (at the time of this writing). I periodically extend, aiming to keep ten years out — they won't renew longer.

This web site is hosted at Hostinger, hostinger.com, paid up thru August 2034. I first tried their free service, 000webhost.com, but they kept sending out "Are you there?" emails, which is not acceptable for a site that I plan to outlive me for a while. (This section defines how long that should be, unless my heirs extend it.)

Hostinger has automated web site building and other neat features, but I use few. Instead, I have an image of the site on my computer where I build, write and test new features, and upload them to the website. This approach has already allowed me to switch providers almost instantly — when I switched from 000webhost to Hostinger.

Design Overview

The site itself is build upon the W3.CSS cascading style sheet, www.w3schools.com/w3css/. It's clean and crisp, but (at least as I use it), it lacks fancier features found elsewhere. It does have plenty of good working examples, such as how to have a button to sort a table, which I did for my Balanced Beer Ratings. I use a common header and footer, maintained in separate files and copied into primary pages. Secondary HTML pages use a stripped-down header & footer that only know about the parent primary page.

In order to be able to test changes before putting them online, all references to files on this site, within files on this site, are relative. That is, no URLs refer to 3nt.xyz or start with a leading slash. Instead, they start with a file name, a subdirectory within the current directory, or a relative path using ../ to go up a level. This means I can open any menu-type file on my computer; that page and any links to other pages on my system should work — all on my computer — without using the external web.

In January 2021, the site was overhauled to

separate Historical from Recent but private photos,
move the primary page for an area into its own directory (e.g. about.htm became about/index.html), and
put the search box on its own page (shrinking its top panel space to only a ⌕).

In March 2021, the top-menu was slimmed down, so it is now unlikely to wrap around on a narrow window or screen. The Home item was replaced with an icon. The Bridge and Photos items and the Search icon remain the same. The contents of the About item are the same with the addition of the Recent Updates feature; About also now has a pulldown menu.

The Ideas item has gained a pulldown menu. The former Fitness and Politics items are now on this menu, and the rest of the Ideas have been organized into six more items. Each of these eight items goes to its own table on the page. Other than replacing two index.html files with stubs, no file were moved, so there should be no stale links.

Site Search

The free Javascript Kit site has tools to search a specific site using various search engines.

Caution: Because Javascript Kit is not a secure (https) site, I keep use of their tools to an easily-understood minimum. I copied and customized their code, making it mine — their site is referenced on 3nt.xyz only in the link above and in comments.

The simplest model from Javascript Kit is implemented here, searching only with Google. Results are based on what Google's robots found on 3nt.xyz in their most recent probing of the site. Unfortunately, that does not seem to happen very often. I'll be checking if I can improve that. Using the Google search has the advantage to me of showing what hits people "out there" might be getting.

A better search may be available using FreeFind. It would allow me to index 3nt.xyz whenever I want; and it would also index the contents of PDFs, which Google may not do. However, I don't know how much baggage comes with the free version, or if 3nt.xyz would exceed the indexing limit. It's not worth $60 or more a year to me for the professional version. [If search results are not in the typical Google style, then I made the switch, but have not yet updated this page.]

Design Details

In order to make the site work properly — especially the top menu panel — both on the web and testing with files on my computer, most key files must live at the second level, in the directories for specific areas. Some files are also kept at the top level. Each area includes an index.html file that includes a copy of 0-header.htm and 0-footer.htm, as mentioned above. These pages can automatically find each other using relative locations (e.g. ../area/index.html), as well as my copy of w3.css, favicon.ico, and the image on the home page.

For backward compatibility, all the pages at the top level are stubs that redirect immediately to the corresponding index.html file. To provide an entry to the site, index.htm must also be a stub, redirecting to home/index.html:


<html>
<title>Redirect - Pete Matthews Jr.</title>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0,home/index.html">
</head>
<body>
    <p>If this page does not redirect, click here:
    <a href="home/index.html">home/index.html<a>.
    </p>
</body>
</html>

A file named index.htm seems to be handled differently by Microsoft from all other .htm files. This does not matter on the Internet, but it does when I am testing files on my computer. I use index.htm only for the stub at the top level, where it is needed; elsewhere I use the name index.html to provide a Microsoft-safe zone.

No SSI. At Draper Lab, I had an in-house web site, which allowed me to use a neat feature called server side includes (SSI). Each of my pages would point to the master header and footer files and the server would include them at display time. I had a second web site just for testing, no big deal. If Windoze would support SSI on my local files, I could use SSI on 3nt.xyz, and still test on my computer - which is also my backup of the site. I tried it, and Windows 10 Home did not oblige.

Dominant Colors. Other than black, white and gray, the main colors used on 3nt.xyz are w3-teal (#009688) and w3-pale-yellow (#ffffcc).

Photo Page Overview

We decided long ago to avoid proprietary methods for organizing photo files, for example, eschewing Photoshop Elements other than its editor. Our standard for file names is "yyyy-mm-dd %n description" where %n is a sequence number specific to the folder or application. This allows us to use normal Windows tools to organize and sort files by name. BreezeBrowser Pro, www.breezesys.com/, has been adding a lot to that approach since 2005. We use it extensively in sorting many thousands of pictures into folders, moving, copying, ordering, renumbering, renaming and batch renaming, jumping into the PSE Editor, and deleting to a Deleted folder.

HTML photo pages are generated automatically using BreezeBrowser Pro. We have found that fairly long file names work well with this process, which I have customized to turn the file name into the photo caption, among other changes. A few years ago, I bought three copies of ACDSee, hoping to gain fancy photo tagging features. We did not use it, and I eventually removed the software. Instead, I decided upon distilling the best we have into the web pages that I am rolling out.

The tools are great, but the process is still slow. We have lots of recent pictures, where the problem is deciding which ones make the cut. (2008 still has me stumped - I have reduced 6,000 pictures from Italy to 2,000, still way too many.) Historical pictures can be loose or in albums. Those in albums are sometimes glued down. Annotations for historical photos are often terse, if present at all. Any picture we have can probably be cleaned up and used, if only we know who is in it.

BBpro also reduces the resolution of photos to at most 1100 x 900. [This feature builds on one for sending proofs to a client; I chose this resolution.] With reduced resolution, photos will download faster, fit better onto screens, and take up less of the limited disk space on the server.

When a photo is selected in BBpro, using Ctrl+Shift+I brings up a page on which IPTC data can be entered. I now use the Description and Copyright fields heavily. I modified my BBpro HTML-generation templates to display the description smaller and below the main caption, and to display the copyright info [as entered] quite small under the photo. I use that to provide photographer details which can help to date an old photo, as well as an actual (c) copyright. The main caption is the file name, with the extension chopped off. There is no data base — everything I want to say about a photo is in the file itself or in its name. (If anybody uses BBpro and would like my templates, I'll be glad to send them to you.)

For each folder on the web site, there is a corresponding folder of full-resolution photos on my computer, that I would be glad to make available to family members. Recent photos are in annual folders under BEST BY YEAR. Historical photos are under HISTORICAL. I'm considering a page for Art photos by Karen, which would be under ART. Other photos for the web site are under WEB PAGES. Nothing in these folders is an original. Within these folders, there may be any number of other folders, and any folder may have a folder named Deleted. A Deleted folder should contain the original copy of any edited photo, out-takes of any kind, etc. Deleted folders can be important!

Many other folders are named by years and contain originals. (Karen organized some originals by subject, that I put into a Specific Subjects folder and ignore for now.) That's my whole organization, except for the pile under the rug: CLEAN OUT, BEST BEFORE DIGITAL, Highlights, Photo Extras (ostensibly duplicates), and one other lost folder that I have a note about somewhere. It all takes time! My copy of the web site is in 3NT in my Documents folder.

Karen now mostly uses Google Photos, which provides her with immediate access anywhere (but expensive when using smartphone data). I periodically download copies of all her stuff, getting it ready to distill into BEST BY YEAR, as well as into our backup system.

Photo Page Details

This Breezebrowser Pro window shows the settings I used to generate the photo directory for "Sole E95 Assembly in Captioned Pictures" on the Fitness page on this site.

The parent of each photo directory on the site, the photos directory containing Sole_E95 in this example, must contain the file index.html. The generated index.htm file within each photo directory starts with a "^ Back to Parent ^" link to "../index.html". That file could be a redirect file, as illustrated above.

A photo directory can be relocated at will, so long as the index.html file is in the parent directory.

BBpro uses templates to generate a directory for the web from a folder containing photos. I pointed the tool at my own directory and heavily modified the template used for all the full size image pages. Among the improvements was recognizing the left, right and up arrow keys. Trapping the arrow keys was relatively easy, but I was not able to trap the Escape key. I also trap the up arrow key on the index page, going to ../index.html.

Swipe Support Removed

Unfortunately, handling swipes on touch devices disables the default handling of pinches (zooming in and out), which I decided was more valuable. I had tried three different methods from the web, deciding on hammer.js. How I did it is documented at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62076076/operate-on-swipe-left-right-leave-all-other-swipes-pinches-and-taps-alone

Publication Notes

The official home of information about PDF document construction on this site is now in this PDF:

Publication Notes - 3nt.xyz

Printing Media J, T or X Documents

Some articles on this site are presented in Junior size, half an 8.5 by 11-inch letter sheet, in Portable Document Format (PDF). This format is noted by J in the Media column. On a small screen, this format works much better than a full letter size PDF especially if you rotate your screen to horizontal. However, if you print what you see in your web browser, it will usually print in the upper left corner, with half the paper wasted.

Note: Most of the principles for printing a Media J document also apply to newer Media K, but you should be able to print a Media K document from your browser, without downloading it first.

To print a Media J document properly, first download it, and then open it with Acrobat Reader. You then have the choice of expanding the print to fill the sheet (large type), or printing 2-up (two pages per side, saving paper). The current version of Acrobat Reader is available at https://get.adobe.com/reader/. Keep the box checked to install the Acrobat Reader extension for your web browser, if applicable. Definitely uncheck the boxes, so that the optional offers from McAfee do not get installed.

Media T is designed for a book in US Trade format (6" x 9"). To print the file or parts of it on US Letter paper, print it with "Fit" as if it were Media J. 2-up is not recommended for Media T.

Media X is designed for a book in Executive format (7" x 10"). To print the file or parts of it on US Letter paper, print it with "Fit" as if it were Media J. 2-up is not recommended for Media T or X.

Caution: Various browsers and/or print drivers may be able to do what you want, but Acrobat reader is more reliable. For example, if you use Windows 10, the default handler for PDFs is the Edge browser, which cannot print 2-up. However, Edge should be able to do large printing for Media J documents: select the Scale option of Fit to page (not actual size).

Large Printing for Media Code J, T or X Documents

Download the PDF to your system (or save it as PDF from MS Word).
Open the PDF using Acrobat Reader, and invoke the print dialog (Ctrl-P on Windows).
Select Portrait orientation, the Size option, and then the Fit to page option.
To print on both sides of the paper, check that box and then click Flip on long edge.

[(IMAGE) Dell 3760-PS Multiple, 2 pages per sheet, print both sides]

2-up Printing for Media Code J Documents

Download the PDF to your system (or save it as PDF from MS Word).
Open the PDF using Acrobat Reader, and invoke the print dialog (Ctrl-P on Windows).
Select Portrait orientation, the Multiple option, and then 2 pages per sheet.
To print on both sides of the paper, check that box and then click Flip on long edge.

[IMG: Dell 3760-PS Multiple, 2 pages per sheet, print both sides]