Technical Information And History

These pages were initially created using an old Amiga2000 ... I have had this ancient machine for nearly 6 years now. During the early stages of the pages development I also seized (as was needed) two of my friends machines to do some web work.

Currently, all the pages are maintained through a Windows 95 machine and a Power Mac. I use both Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro for the graphics, and I even sometimes resort back to Deluxe Paint on the Amiga (some things an Amiga can only *still* do:).

I also used Director 4 and Sound Edit 16 for most of the animations and all the sounds (thank God for Macromedia:). Most pictures are 256 coloured interlaced GIF images or less. Some are JPEG images (this is particularly true for the Jade section of electric.rain home page).

Some of the pictures are actually only 16 Coloured Hires interlaced Amiga pictures, converted to interlaced gifs. The 16 colour pictures are some of the best on the site in my opinion. For example the Jade title screen picture is only 16 colours. As are a few of the anime pictures. There was a lot of colour mixing going on to get the right colour mixture in some of these pictures.

A chunk of the text code came from converted Amiga Guide Hyper Text documents which I had on my drive (I created the Travel FAQ, Haiku Book and Japanese Voice Dictionary myself) and then used Heddley to convert them to HTML form ... and then went through each document and added the various style sheets, bullets and backgrounds ... I used CygnusED to do this and some of the other HTML code as well ... and DOpus was also invaluable in shifting all the disks back and forth from an IBM disk to be tested on a friends IBM and university Macintosh's .. I noticed the PCs sometimes stuffed up the colours.

I originally started putting a electric.rain together just to learn HTML code I learnt most of it from using the "view source" function of Netscape on other web sites and from two fellow Australian students Mordan (seems to have vanished off the web) and Trevor Phillips as well as the various web sites around the world which contained "HTML-coding-for-newbies" information ... oh .. and my girlfriend (now Wife) also bought me HTML for Dummies to help me out .. thanks Joyce.

I then wanted to do a site for a local competition being held by AUSNET .. then I learnt more HTMl and improved my drawing techniques even further because I went for a Web job with the aforementioned AUSNET (which I did not get) ... though this site maybe a bit "Gaudy" ... remember why it existed in the first place .. and that was so it would impress Judges in a Competition (?) and a potential employer (Which it didn't) .. but I'm going to leave it as is -nice and Bright.

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