About This Site

What's in it?

As the index indicates, a mixture of private and professional stuff. Many pictures, of course. Most of it will only be of little interest for the occasional visitor, exept that it makes it possible to find and contact me.

As you'll notice, I'm pretty open with providing personal information; some people wondered about it. My main criteria is that I wouldn't publish anything that I'd not tell an arbitrary nice guy who happens to sit next to me at the bar in my favourite pub. Of course I don't know whether you are nice -- try to be, please, with respect to the information provided here.

Of course, everything on this site is copyrighted by me unless otherwise noted. Permission is hereby granted to use the material provided as long as my copyright is mentioned. This permission can be revoked any time at my deliberation.

I decided to keep this site in English as the lingua franca of the net, although my mother tongue is German. I appreciate corrections.

Technicalities

First of all, this site is hand crafted; whether that's a good idea I don't know yet, but it works quite well so far. I just use a programmer's text editor (vim) for editing. Hand written html definitely is small and relatively clean (but of course there will be errors that wouldn't happen with machine generated html). Obviously, this is also no place for fancy design or web show-off, mainly because I'm not really a web wiz, and for the reasons that Bjarne Stroustrup mentions on his site.

The Frames Issue

I think a site should have some kind of navigation menu in order to "improve the user experience". I am using frames for navigation; moreover, I use a single navigation menu (/navi.html). The main disadvantage is that you don't see the URL of the page that you are viewing, and thus can't easily bookmark it. (If you right-click on a link in the navigation frame and Choose "Open in new Window" or "Tab", you will see it though.)

There are two reasons for me to stick with this concept though. First, it's really easy to maintain. Right, I could scatter copies of the menu page all over my site (like e.g. Spiegel magazine does it), but then any change in the site structure would make changes in all menus necessary. It also would have to be reloaded every time the user navigates to a different page (it can't be cached, because it's a different document each time).
The second problem with scattered menus is that either the links must be absolute (like "http://www.schneiderp.de/home.html", or at least "/home.html"), or the relative links would be different (like "../home.html" on one place and "../../home.html" one directory below), although they look and function identically. That I'd consider a maintenance nightmare without machine support. The alternative, identical copies with absolute links, break my local copy on my machine. Currently, I can preview my entire site locally. Absolute links obviously would not refer to local copies, relative ones do without problem.

Summing up, the current strategy avoids redundancy and preserves a working local copy.

Imprint, Disclaimer

Responsible for the content on this site: Peter Schneider; address see here. I claim copyright for everything on this site unless otherwise noted.

I checked all links to other sites carefully, but their contents may change or I may have overlooked something. Therefore, should any link still not lead to obscene or illegal material, please give me a short notice and I will remove it immediately.

Last update Sep 23rd, 2004