ABOUT KIBO'S EXPLODING WEB SITE

Kibo welcomes you!

Thank you for coming to www.kibo.com. I'm James "Kibo" Parry, who is to the Internet what Charles Nelson Reilly was to "Match Game '77". If you've ever read Usenet news, you've likely seen me hanging around various groups for the past ten years, especially alt.religion.kibology, the source of most of the junk on this site. (Kibology is actually the source of all the junk everywhere in the universe, but don't tell anyone who doesn't know the secret milkshake.)

I hope you can find something to stare at for hours on this site. If you can't, there's a ton of links to other places.

I actually try to update this site periodically; I hate those pages that stay the same month after month (usually with a lot of "Under Construction" graphics where the content should be.) News of changes will be posted to the "What's New" page here. News of lack of changes, for those times when I forget to update the "Junk Food Reviews" page for six months, will not be posted. (if you're desperate for reading material, the "Raw Data" section, which contains Kibo's Usenet articles in large piles, is updated weekly.)

This site is designed to complement the alt.religion.kibology newsgroup: newsgroups are great for spontaneous, interactive, ephemeral discussion. But the Web is better for archiving long texts or pictures. So keep watching the random "flow-through" action in alt.religion.kibology as well as browsing the older stuff on this site. One of the pages here discusses Usenet techniques to make it easier to work with newsgroups (killfiles, etc.)

This page has a philosophy.
That makes it better than yours.

Web browsers are fragile assemblies of bugs, held together with Hello Kitty stickers. They tend to have problems with complicated pages, especially if they're long. Some of my pages are pretty long, and I want them to work with any Web browser on any computer, and so I've been very careful not to do anything unkosher, daring, or cool. This site is heavy on plain old text: I have used no frames, no "<BLINK>", no sounds, no MIDI, no Shockwave, no ActiveX, no CSS, no JavaScripts, no Javas, no Jawas, no Jabbas, no Bobas, nothing too wide to show on a low-resolution screen, no interlaced or progressive images, etc. This hyper-conservative approach to Web design should make these pages work with even the crappiest Web browsers, i.e. WebTV, Web Zeppelin, Bandai @World ("Pippin"), Sega Dreamcast, etc. Even Lynx. (More or less. I mean, lynx is no fun 'cause it shows all those words.)

To make the text readable, it's normally dark on a light background (no Wired-esque magenta on green.) It should also print out correctly on white paper -- don't you hate those sites that make you buy special black paper so you can print out white text? I didn't set the pages to demand any particular fonts, so the pages will always show up in your choice of typeface. In general, for browsers, I recommend a serif typeface (Baskerville, Palatino, Times, Garamond, etc.), and enabling anti-aliasing (a.k.a. font smoothing) if your system supports it (either via Adobe Type Manager Deluxe, Windows's "Plus", or Mac OS's "Appearance".) The links will also use your choices of link colors. (I violate my color rules on two black pages just 'cause, hey, I'm the only one allowed to break my rules, and I figured nobody wants to print out my "front door" page.)

(By the way, for ease of reading, try making your browser's window narrower so that lines of text are shorter. This causes less eyestrain from going back and forth. A good width for printed matter is about ten to twelve words across.)

Basically, I don't like Web sites that demand "You must upgrade your Web browser, your display card, and your monitor to be even allowed to think about looking at my home page," so you're allowed to look at www.kibo.com with anything, but I'm still going to be pompous and make suggestions about how I think your computer should be configured anyway. Because, hey, I'm Kibo. (I give people lots of advice because I'm anal-inventive.)

The only graphical luxury I've allowed my site is lots of animated GIFs, which most browsers should be able to play reasonably well (sometimes more slowly or more rapidly than others, but who cares? Sorry, NetHopper and Lynx users, you can't see the animation of Spot exploding.) These GIFs are pretty teeny because they use a small number of colors (no dithering, all the pixels hand-tweaked, anti-aliased entirely by hand) so the sixty-plus frames of Spot blowing up are only 38,000 bytes; the other GIFs are really tiny. So you shouldn't spend too much time waiting for the graphics to load, if your connection's up to speed.

The pages in my Photo Gallery have several medium-weight JPEGs on each page (circa 25k per picture) but I assume that if you're going to a photo gallery you don't mind waiting for some photos to load. (Of course, if you actually read the paragraph of text above the pictures, you won't notice them taking a few seconds to load. Or if you have a fast Internet connection, you can just sit there saying, "Neener, neener, I'm making Kibo's Web site load faster than he said it would.")

My most firm-yet-finicky rule: No dopey "Under Construction" clip-art graphics or winking mailboxes or tiny blue spheres pasted into my site; I drew my own cheesy icons. (That "blue ball" icon is so 1994.)

I tested these pages with various browsers, but I don't have every browser in the world (I don't want most of them!), so please let me know if my pages somehow manage to break your browser.

Any strange effects you may come across (intentional ones, that is) are done with server-side technology, meaning that things like banner-switching are done on the big computer here, and not by pushing chunks of JavaScript at your browser to crash your computer. In the future you'll see this site making heavier use of XSSIs and custom CGIs (which, again, are a server-side thing so they shouldn't slow things down or break your computer.) I absolutely refuse to use JavaScript, Shockwave, or any other flaky client-side technology that works reliably on some computers, works unreliably on others, and isn't available on others. (XSSIs and CGIs run on www.kibo.com itself, not your PC, so they're guaranteed to work the same for everyone and require no support from your browser. And besides, Perl scripts run kind of fast on this six-CPU SGI.)

Want to link to my site?

Hey, you don't need to ask. (I didn't ask the 500 or so people whose sites are listed on my link pages; I hope nobody's upset.) If you're too lazy to type in the HTML yourself, here's code you can paste into your page, complete with an annoying little GIF to go with it:

<a href="http://www.kibo.com/">
<img src="/i/kibopage_anim.gif" width=90 height=36 alt="Kibo" border="1">
Official home page of James "Kibo" Parry, now with free beer!</a>

And by popular request, here are two bigger ones:

<a href="http://www.kibo.com/">
<img src="/i/kibopage_vanity.gif" width="155" height="72" alt="[Kibo's Page]" border="1">
Official home page of James "Kibo" Parry and his splendid ego!</a>

<a href="http://www.kibo.com/">
<img src="/i/kibopage_inside.gif" width="160" height="160" alt="[Kibo's Page]" border="1">
Official home page of James "Kibo" Parry, the only Web page that makes your computer cooler!</a>

Credit where credit's due.

I wrote all this HTML the hard way (by smashing my fingers against a keyboard) because programs like Microsoft FrontPage cause me to develop bulging blood vessels in my forehead and start running around yelling obscenities at people. (And the server extensions which tie into FrontPage are enormous security holes.) Anyway, here are the tools I used:

Computer: Power Mac (G3/275) with a Pentium (166) co-processor for those times I feel like exposing myself to Windows. (Actually, lately I've moved to doing most of this editing on my laptop because it's a good way to kill time on the train.)

Text editor: BBEdit 5.0.

Syntax checker: Various (gotta have several!) but mainly BBEdit.

Graphics tools: The whole Adobe she-bang (Photoshop, Illustrator, ImageReady) and Yves Piguet's freeware GifBuilder 0.5.

Web server: Stronghold, a commercial version of Apache with some extra features, running on an SGI Challenge L (six processors).

Web browsers: various versions (for Mac OS, Windows, and UNIX) of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, lynx, and (shudder) the WebTV Simulator. Yes, you actually can run the WebTV browser on a real computer to see if your pages will fit on a TV screen. (I figure if I can make my pages viewable on a WebTV they should work on anything better. I haven't yet formed an opinion on how the WebTV compares to the Dreamcast as a Web browser.)

And no, I didn't steal anyone else's icons. (Are you sick of little blue balls and burning torches too?) Typefaces used within my graphics are from the Adobe and Bitstream libraries, plus some of my own designs.

I wuv my Internet Service Provider.

My Internet host is world.std.com, operated by Software Tool & Die in Brookline, MA, USA. World.std.com was the first publicly-accessible dialup Internet service (in late 1989.) I really like them: they have a great Usenet feed, and the machine's fast and reliable. Good staff, too. (I'm not making this up: I have no complaints whatsoever.) For more information, see World's home page.

UPDATE!

(December, 1997) Since writing the above paragraph, I have become a World staff member. But since I wrote it before I was hired, it doesn't count as advertising. I can say it all I want: "I loved The World before they hired me." Anyway, if you notice that The World's home page bears some resemblance to the style of www.kibo.com, that's my fault.

(January, 1999) We just got a much nicer Web server which now supports some features I've been lusting after for a year. This makes it simple for me to make pages which change themselves automatically (such as the "Do What I Say" page which has different text on it every week.) I plan to add more pages which mutate themselves at each visit, just so that the site will at least be slightly different even when I don't get off my butt and actually produce new content.

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