[Repentigny, Québec (Canada)] Here it is, finally! After 2 years and a half of Powhertz over a year to complain about the technical problems of the host NBCi/Xoom, Powhertz 2 is there! It's been many hours of hard work, but it worthed it because we feel that Powhertz was much improved.
Address and hosting
Adios the http://members.nbci.com/Powhertz/ and http://members.xoom.com/Powhertz/
, Powhertz has now its own domain: powhertz.com . More than ever, the address
is short, sweet and easy to remember! Please note that the address http://powhertz.cjb.net
was also reserved in case of unpredictable problems with the main address.
As for the hosting of Powhertz 2, it is not done on NBCi/Xoom's servers
anymore; Powhertz is now physically on an independant server that's much
more reliable (should be up over 99% of the time while Xoom wasn't even
able to reach to 85%) and which does not impose any ads. You'll notice
by the way there is no more ads top frame floating over every page of the
site. The few rare ads you'll see on the home page are absolutely voluntary
from the author of Powhertz.
A new technological approach
Powhertz has always seen as fundamental to have a site that works properly
with any Web browser, wether it's your old Netscape 2 on a 80386 computer
or the brand new that's just releasing on a lesser-known platform like
QNX. However, for Powhertz 2, Powhertz got to a point that he wanted to
vary better its use of the different Web standards by using some Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript and CGI scripts (to come in the next months)
to the obvious HTML. There were very strict constraints of compatibility
though: all code had to fit at 100% into the official Web standards and
every functionality had to be fully functional, without any error and without
any constraint not only on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and up and Netscape
Navigator 4 and up, but also on the popularity-gaining Opera 4.0 and up
and Konqueror 1.0 and up. It's not been so easy (the superb menu made for
the Powhertz files was dropped because it was not working on Opera), it's
been done successfully. That doesn't mean that Powhertz won't work properly
on a browser that's not Netscape, IE, Opera or Konqueror, though! Because
Powhertz 2 respects the standards and does not make its vital functionalities
depend on new technologies, it should be easily usable using almost any
Web browser.
Modifications to the site
It would be long if not impossible to list all the changes, but let's
say in brief that the home page was re-started from scratch for a much
more professional look, new banners were added, the "about the author and
administrator" page was also re-started from scratch for the curious, without
forgetting all of the work done to repair the links of the 90 pages of
the site so make them relative and so portable to the new Powhertz! Lots
of work, done with the tools The GIMP (on Linux) for the graphics (at least,
the graphics that are from Powhertz! For example, blue balls and the white
enveloppe were taken somewhere else!) and the surprising Evrsoft 1st Page
2000, a totally free Web edition tool for Windows that looks like Allaire
HomeSite, a bit less good but still of much better cost value!
Newbies of the week
We take this opportunity to present the links of
the months of June & July as well as a new question of the month.
For the birth of Powhertz 2, the chosen question was the same as the birth
of the original Powhertz and the one that generated the most votes in Powhertz
history: the Web browser that you use the most often! Everybody vote, please!
Lack of time!
Unfortunately, the projects were so big that not everything was ready
in time for the release of Powhertz 2. However, you can expect to see most
of these changes appear over the next 2 months:
Powhertz
2001/07/15