About Our Website

We were fairly early in establishing our first website: 2005. In those days, most people had no idea what HTML or CSS meant. They were just discovering the world wide web, and trying to decide if was okay to actually type a credit card number into their desktop browser.

This was a full two years before Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone, and no one even considered the outrageous idea of accessing the web via a phone.

Our choices were very limited, and we elected to use a Microsoft software called FrontPage. It was one of the early "WYSIWYG" (what you see is what you get--pronounced "wizzi-wig") web creation software, and Frontpage worked, mostly. But Frontpage created very verbose, clunky code, and required special server extensions. It was an old fashioned solution. Soon, the internet world continually changed and improved tools were created.

We have known that our site needed to be upgraded for several years. Even though this is a very simple site, updating is a big job, because the old code has to be extensively cleaned and massaged, with near-infinite find-and-replace passes, and a lot of tedious typing. All of that is required after you create the new site, of course.

We finally got version 2.0 up and running in the spring of 2017. The new site features HTML5 and CSS3, and was constructed with a recognition that a lot of our customers have limited bandwidth, so it's light weight. We are hosting in on the Amazon S3 service, which we like a lot.

The site is also optimized for cell phones, using the mobile responsive @media command in the CSS, along with meta viewport in the header of the HTML.

We used Editpad Pro as a "smart" text editor to code the new site. Even if Editpad didn't allow the use of WordStar commands, we'd still love it. WordStar was the best text editor of its day, and still has many famous adherents.

The only javascript on this site is the Google search engine. All of the header animation was done solely with CSS3. If you want to click "refresh" and watch the AgTruck do its slow roll again, it's okay with us. We love watching it...

P.S. The photo credit for the home page's lovely background image--our Thrush S2-R G6 bearing down on the viewer at 150 mph--goes to McKenzie Grace. Great eye! Thanks.