The Bondi Beach Home Page

2004

The Bondi Beach Home Page is maintained by Brian Robson. This home page aims to provide fast, useful, enjoyable information about Bondi without the clutter seen on most web pages.

Instant bio: Brian has lived in Bondi for over 35 years. In his other life he writes databases for archaeologists, and before that he wrote databases describing heritage-listed properties.

If you have a suggestion, a question or just want to say hello, send an email from this form.

Brian's interests, other than web pages, databases, the NBN and the Internet generally, include the history of the Romans, the Dark Ages and the medieval cathedral builders, the history of science, alternative country and western music, 50s and 60s rock'n'roll, the use and abuse of the English language, and counteracting the effects of advertising. He prefers cats to dogs. He never plays computer games and has never rented a video or been to a gym.

This web site began in March 1996, with original design and writing by Nicos Souleles and Claire Pillar. Many thanks for the enduring simplicity of the design and to all those who have made suggestions along the way.

Cameras: Brian's digital camera starting from August 2003 by Olympus, models C-5050 and C-5060. Note that Olympus cameras take pictures with an aspect ratio of 4:3, the same as a standard TV set or an old movie (pre-widescreen). Digital pictures for this web site are currently taken at a resolution of 5.5 megapixels, pretty low by current standards. From 1999 to 2003, film cameras by Konica (great shutter-priority SLR's), negative film by Kodak (who can beat Kodachrome 64 and 25, and now look what's happened), with prints by Fuji processed on Bondi Road (back in the era of one-hour processing shops).

Scanning: Since August 2008, an HP C-6280 All-in-One scanner has been used when needed (for example the old Bondi photographs) with scanning directly to a memory chip at 300 dpi. Prior to that, it was an HP-5300 at 150 dpi to scan all the pictures taken with film cameras.

Picture Editing: PaintShopPro Version 3 (yes, version 3) from 1995, and sometimes PaintShopPro Version 7.

The thumbnails are all made using EZ-Thumbs from the www.fookes.com/ezthumbs web site. Confusing to use, but perfect results.

Picture sizes: Originally 120 by 90 for thumbnails with 600 by 465 for larger images. Given the widespread usage of broadband connections and larger monitors, the picture sizes have been increased to 160 by 120 for thumbnails and 770 by 577 for the larger images.

Web pages: HTML is constructed using Notepad Plus. For Quality Assurance and usability testing, this site uses the Firefox Web Developer toolbar add-in plus the W3C on-line HTML Page Validator, the webmaster tips pages and the on-line Link Checker all from the World Wide Web Consortium at www.w3.org (see under Validators). Link checking is done using a German program called Xenu's Link Sleuth. File transfer programmes that are used to talk to the server have included WS-FTP (an oldie but a goodie), Fire-FTP (written by a self-selected self-obsessed team of volunteers) and FileZilla (File-transfer crossed with Godzilla).

Sunnies were not worn and no bottled water was drunk during the making of this web site. However, everyone here in Bondi exists on a diet of just Cappuccinos and Sun Dried Tomatoes on Turkish Bread, although on the weekend, we have Bagels as a special treat. For backpackers, a cafe on Bondi Road has 'Irish Chips' on their menu.

This site is dedicated to Vincent Flanders and Jakob Nielsen whose contributions to the Internet still remain in the mists of history yet to be written. Further helpful thoughts in the newsletters about web page content from Gerry McGovern.

Last updated: 11th August 2012.
This page's URL: http://www.bondivillage.com/about.htm