the tool page

toolshed.down.net

online since 1995

This site is no longer being updated. See here for details. Follow me here (and here) for updates. Thank you for 22 great years.

ABOUT

technical info nuts, bolts, etc

In case you were curious about what goes on underneath the hood here at The Tool Page, here's a list of answers to some common questions.

About the domain name

If you've read the history of this site, you know that this page has moved a few times, finally ending up here. In spring of 1996, after I registered down.net, I had the idea to move the site to a new address, at something.down.net. Myself, Shane, and some others were all stumped as to what that "something" should be. I asked Maynard for any ideas. He suggested toolshed. How do you say no to that?

toolshed.down.net is a virtual domain, originally hosted on a friend's machine: empyrean.fdemocracy.org; then was down for a few months, then was hosted on jewnix.org, then on horde.zerodivide.net, then i.makintosh.com, then back and forth, and is now served by webair.com, a web hosting company which handles the ominous task of serving all the WWW hits to this site.

The down.net domain itself belongs to Kabir Akhtar, and serves various purposes suited to my personal agenda. *evil laugh*

What font is that?

As the redesign of the site continues, the typeface migration continues as well. Buttons are in Trebuchet MS. Section headers are in Georgia. The font you are reading should be Verdana.

The font used in the old headers of each page since the very beginning until 2000 was a font innocuously titled "Sans Serif." This font was also used for the old bue-green menu choices, which appeared Undertow-esque thanks to Photoshop. The font used in the Ænima liner notes can be approximated with a font called "Eras."

What computer / program did you use to do that?

Ever since the very beginning, this site has been designed and managed on Macintoshes. The home machine has ranged from an old Power Mac 7100 back in the day to an iBook today. Until early 2001, no HTML documents were formatted by an HTML-designing-program. (Plaintext editors are not only faster to learn, but they became obsolete within minutes in the mid-to-late 1990s as web design evolved rapidly.)

All documents were originally hand-coded, but for a time in 2001 and 2002 some were edited by Adobe GoLive. Who knew, they make programs to organize these things for you. After a time, though, I went back to coding by hand, just because it is a lot faster. Photoshop and Illustrator are my friends as well.

Average hits per day:

The day Ænima came out, suddenly this site served over 100,000 files that day.

The day Lateralus came out, this site had over 57,000 visitors.

The day 10,000 Days came out, this site had nearly 65,000 visitors!!!

Now, accesses average from 15,000-35,000 people daily.

Crazy. And this is still just a hobby.

Where can I learn to do that with HTML?

Use the View Source command up there in the menus; experiment, make your site unique.

Also learn about CSS -- the CSS Zen Garden really inspired me to learn CSS.

Best of luck.


kabir/akhtar | kabir@t.d.n