About The Mellowood Web Pages

As you probably already know, the pages are maintained by Bob van der Poel. Mostly pretty boring stuff . . . but everyone else is doing it!

These pages were created on a PC running Linux. Most of the pages were written with an ordinary text editor and and then piped though a macro processor.

Ahh, macro processors—Originally I used the Unix program M4; however, this was far from satisfactory.

Several years ago I stumbled across a program written in the TCL scripting language. The program Expand.tcl lets you call TCL commands which are defined in a rules file, or in the html-source text. Very cool. But, I don't like programming in TCL ... especially when the only thing I was using it for was expand.tcl. Seemed that every time I used it I had to relearn TCL. Pain.

So, in true hacker fashion I wrote my own replacement HTMLexp. Does about the same (although I have to state that expand.tcl does have some neat features!). But, this time it's written in Python, a language I use just about every day. So, no more relearning!

To keep everything ticking like a fine watch, I also rely on some python scripts and the Unix program "make". I keep my local copy and the actual remote site synced with sitecopy.

I used to test the pages with a number of popular web browsers; but, I don't bother anymore. I use the latest Mozilla Firefox ... and if something else doesn't work for you I can only suggest that you get the beast.

The images/backgrounds were stolen from various sites in the great wasteland know as the World Wide Web. Most were touched up, resized or something with various Unix graphic manipulation tools. The photos were scanned by me using a Epson Perfection 1260 with SANE software.

Some meaningless statistics about this site:

• 2489 HTML Files:
  • Total Size: 41145902
• 455 Image Files:
  • Total Size: 22800589
• 23 Gzipped archives:
  • Total Size: 10576422
• 433 PDF files:
  • Total Size: 13337959

Aren't you glad you accessed this page...

If you've seen something you like here, say something nice to me. Even better, buy me a beer!