Other graphics elements came from Walnut Creek's Webmaster's Toolkit CD-ROM and some I created myself using Xpaint, the X-windows equivalent of the MS Windows Paint program. Finished pages were viewed with the X-windows version of Netscape 4.03 - the photos have been sized for a screen resolution of 1280x1024 and so look best at this resolution. I also looked at them at lower resolutions on a PC running the MS Windows version of Netscape to make sure they look OK on the sort of system most people are likely to be using - this is the worst bit as different browsers, video resolutions and platforms all make the pages look different. I've found there's no way you can lay out pages so they'll look right on all systems (unless you stick to plain text only) so it's really a question of designing pages that'll keep the majority happy. Finally, the completed pages were FTP'd up to the anugraha web server.

(It never ceases to amaze me the number of people with bang-up-to-date 200+ MHz PCs and video cards like the Matrox Millenium or the Diamond range yet they're still using plain old VGA!! VGA at 640x480 was introduced by IBM as an entry-level standard more than 10 years ago ... it was supposed to be an interim PC video format to ease the transition from digital displays to analogue for programmers converting existing applications written for the old EGA format - it certainly wasn't intended to remain as the default resolution for a whole decade! IBM no longer leads PC technology, PCs, monitors and video cards have advanced enormously since 1987 and memory is cheap - why are so many of us still using 640x480??

All the software used for these pages is either free or in the public domain. The huge virtual desktops possible with the X-window system are great for this kind of work - I can have a number of Xterm windows on the desktop each with a file open for editing under vi, and Netscape, ImageMagick and Xpaint all running on other virtual screens yet drag windows around if I want so that they're next to each other, and so on. It's great!