About

This site has its origin in the Hansen Home Page which I put online in April of 1999. I began the site in order to learn HTML and the art and process of web page design. The site slowly grew and the content widened as I had time to work on it. I changed web space providers in 2000 and changed the site name to 2540dpi. While no one seemed to like the name, the site did a good job of showing up in Google with the right search terms, and garnered a modest amount of traffic with the pages listing Macintosh modelers and utilities for POV-Ray, a popular, freeware 3D rendering program.

In February 2002, F2s, the company I had been using for the web site host, discontinued their free services, and I elected not to take them up on their offer of a paid hosting service. So that was the end of 2540dpi. At that time I decided I would purchase a domain name and pay for a hosting service so I wouldn't be subject to the business decisions of a company providing free services. Thus RocketJam.com was born!

FAQ

Q What is RocketJam.com?

A It's my personal project/website.

Q Why?

A I've got a href="mediaandperception.html"this theory/a about popular culture and the media's effect on people's perceptions of themselves and their existence/role in reality. The why of having a web site has something to do with that, I think.

Q Where did the name come from?

A A former co-worker, Anna Jones, gave me the idea. RJay....RocketJam, see? Thanks Anna!

Q Can I get anything for free here?

AHeck yeah! You can get the legendary, ever useful, Scaletron! the user-editable Applescript scaling calculator! You can also get a few other, not quite as exciting, but still possibly useful, editable Applescripts. There's also some Holiday desktop pictures you can grab. To top it off there's free entertainment, a comprehensive link list of Macintosh POV-Ray related software and more! If I ever finish them, there'll be a couple of free fonts some day too.

Q How often is this site updated?

AThat varies. I try to be somewhat steady about updating and posting new content, but it's a hobby and I work on it when I feel like it and as time permits. I would like to have updates at least monthly, but there have been times where updates have been 3 or 4 months apart. I usually note updates on the a href="news.html"News/a page. And all updates are now noted on our a href="#rssabout"RSS feed./a Most pages on the site (at least the newer stuff) also have the date of their last update at the bottom. Check us our often!

Q How is the site built/what tools are used?

AIt's hand-coded HTML with the aid of PageSpinner, a Macintosh HTML editing program. I'm using CSS for (most) of the typography but mostly relying on good old tables for the layout. I use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Strata's Vision3D and StudioPro, POV-Ray and Art of Illusion for the graphics on the site. Photos and other artwork are either scanned with a LinoType-Hell Topaz scanner run from a G4 workstation or my HP ScanJet 3970 or shot with a Canon A-85 digital camera. The XML for our RSS feed is generated with FeedMe 0.8 a nifty, free Mac RSS editor. Graphics and HTML are put together on my Macintosh Blue & White G3/450 at home. Content is uploaded to our web server with Cyberduck, a free Mac ftp client. Links for all the tools in our arsenal are at the bottom of this page.

Q Web Server?

A RocketJam.com is hosted by a href="http://www.dreamhost.com"Dreamhost.com/a. Dreamhost runs their servers on Linux with Apache server software. I'm a ivery/i satisfied customer of Dreamhost's. The offer great packages at great prices and the service and support has been good.

Q How about testing?

AI test pages with MS Internet Explorer 5.1, and 4.5, NetScape 4.7 and the current version of Firefox, Safari, iCab and Opera on a Macintosh. I test them in the current versions of MS Internet Explorer and Netscape or Mozilla on a Windows machine.While the site is designed with newer versions of browsers in mind, I try to make sure it renders decently in as many browsers as possible. I even test them with WannaBe, a Mac text-only browser. I don't go to great lengths to make sure pages render the same in all browsers or make special workarounds for browsers which don't correctly parse and render the site's relatively simple style sheets. Still as I noted, the site is viewable and readable in the browsers I am able to test on.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to regularly test pages over a dial-up connection since I don't have ready access to one. I know at least some sections of the site are not particularly dial-up friendly. The nature of some of the pages on the site naturally makes for a better experience with a high-bandwidth connection. But I try to keep dial-up users in mind and optimize things as much as possible and avoid too much gratuitous use of graphics! ;-)

Q What was that about your RSS feed?

AYes, Rocketjam has an RSS feed available which lists updates to the the news page and elsewhere on the site. You can subscribe to our feed by entering http://www.rocketjam.com/rss.xml into your favorite RSS news aggregator (NewsGator, NetNewsWire etc.). Or the XML icons at the bottom of the main pages links to the news feed URL. Since Rocketjam.com is updated on a sporadic basis, you should probably set your news aggregator to check for updates fairly infrequently (15 minute auto-update cycles will just waste bandwidth :-).

Q Did someone really ask you these questions?

ANo. I made them up. Except this one, which I stole from some other web site I saw ;-). But if I do get some frequently asked questions I'll put 'em here!

Grab our RSS feed!

Questions? Comments? Send email to

This page was last updated Saturday, June 9, 2007