I know there are quite a few regular HTMLHelp.com users that frequent the blog here, so I just wanted to provide an update on the unbelievably pathetic service we are currently receiving from ValueWeb, aka Hostway.

We were notified about a month ago via e-mail that ValueWeb intended to physically take our two servers and move them to another data center about two hours away. But they claimed:

“We plan to have the back up service back online by 8pm EDT on July 28th.”

As worrisome as this sounded, we decided to stick it out with them because they estimated that the outage would be 12-15 hours. The amount of time it would take to migrate to another provider would have been more than this, so I suppose it basically just wasn’t going to be a big enough deal to change.

Flash forward to this weekend, and it’s looking like maybe we should have jumped ship. HTMLHelp.com has been down for more than two days - going on three.
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Although my partners and I have shared HTML authoring information with tens of millions of people on HTMLHelp.com over the previous decade, this is the first time that I’ve ever made available the brief introduction to HTML that I actually use when I’m teaching friends and family or giving lectures at universities or other speaking engagements.

I chose to share it in the hopes that it will be of use both to beginners and to educators looking for a good brief introductory document. In addition to the Web based version below, here is a PDF version that is formatted for printing (I think it’s easier to read).
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As a result of three Digg homepage appearances over a period of a few weeks bringing my blog to it’s knees I decided to make a few changes. In addition to acquiring a new server and finding someone to optimize the heck out of it for me, I also decided to re-vamp my Wordpress theme.

I’m probably a little pickier than most, but I was looking for the following list of features in the new theme:

• Speed - Along with the rapid growth of traffic on this blog I noticed a decline in page responsiveness. That is not something I want to subject hundreds of thousands of people to monthly. But most of the themes I came across suffer from “PHP bloat”, or the author’s feeling that more is always better.
• Accessibility - being one of the founders of HTMLHelp.com, it’s important to practice what I preach. So themes need to be accessible by any Web browser, on any operating system at any screen resolution - including screen readers for the visually impaired. This is currently very, very hard to find.
• Search Friendly - Although almost every theme claims to be “Search engine friendly”, I found that many could use quite a bit of improvement.
• Extensible - Webmasters have different tastes, so themes need to be flexible. Unfortunately the majority are poorly documented, use illogical naming schemes for CLASSes and IDs, and generally make it hard to modify them.

After having no luck finding an appropriate theme out of the hundreds that are publicly available I decided to just build it myself. The theme is currently in use here on One Man’s Blog, and I’m now making it available to anyone that would like to use it.
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On October 8, 1993 CBS ran the following news article entitled A network called ‘Internet’. It’s fascinating to look back at the early days, and I recall them very well. In fact, by the time this video aired I had been online for years, and had even been selling PCs with modems and Internet connectivity via CompuServe and Prodigy since 1990.

In the earliest days of consumer Internet adoption, the first big ISP was CompuServe. It was not unusual in the early 1980s to have to pay a $30-per-hour charge (that would be $21,600 per month!) for a dial-up connection speed of 1200 bps. That’s just over 1 Kb - on a good day - as compared to our current broadband connections that normally exceed 1,500,000 bps or 1,250 times the original speed.
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According to CNN, who is quoting Netcraft - the Neilson’s of the Internet world - the Web just topped the 100 million domain name marker.

Additionally, Time Magazine says that Technorati is claiming that 100,000 new blogs are created each day with over 1.3 million posts added daily.
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