FAQ
This document is an attempt to address the questions I get asked most often. If your question isn't answered here, please feel free to get in touch and I'll be happy to help.
Q. Why the handle pwaring?
A. It's someting that easy to remember and associate with me, without being some lame handle that hundreds of other people are already using. If you see someone going under this handle (with the exception of email addresses and Usenet), it's probably me. Most of the top 20 Google search results for pwaring relate to me in some way. Scary or what?
By the way, pwaring is spelt exactly as you see it here, all lowercase and no punctuation. Some people capitialise one or more of the letters (e.g. PWaring, pWaring), but the correct form is simply pwaring. Yes, I am that pedantic!
Q. Why the site name Rixort?
A. It's just a name that I came that I came up with one day when I was looking at Slash Code. I wanted a name that, like Slash Code, when written in lowercase contained no trailing letters (e.g. g, j and p) and preferably had an x in it somewhere. Eventually, after playing around with various words, I came up with Rixort. It sounded right to me, so I decided to use it as the name for my site.
I think that Rixort might mean something in Dutch or German, but since I don't study either of these languages I can't say for sure. If you know anything about other sites by the same name, or indeed what the word means (if anything at all), please let me know.
Q. What do you for a living?
A. First and foremost, I'm a student at university — so lectures, laboratory sessions and external work related to my course take up a lot of my time during the week. Apart from that, I'm a self-employed freelance agent working for various companies designing/maintaining web sites and also providing web hosting services.
Q. Can I link to your site?
A. Of course, you don't need to ask permission to link to anyone's site, let alone mine (in fact, I'm flattered that you want to link to me in the first place). You can link to any page you like, except the ones that are dynamically generated (e.g. the "thank you" page after contacting me) because these rely on information from submitted forms to work properly and won't make sense out of context.
You don't need to worry about link rot as I won't be changing my site structure for some time, and if I ever do I'll leave redirects and logging in place to catch any stray visitors.
I'm afraid that I don't have any pretty link buttons or banners for you to display, mainly because I couldn't draw to save my life. A text link is fine, just point it to the page you want and let the browsers (and my server) take care of the details.
Q. Will you link to my site?
A. If you think that I'd like your site (and therefore add it to the links section), then feel free to tell me about it. I don't do link exchanges, nor do I link to everyone who asks me to, because I'm not running a portal or search engine here. Don't bother sending me the link if your site is composed entirely of Flash with no optional HTML version; I won't link to it. Neither will I link to sites that spawn lots of popup windows or huge banner adverts.
If you want publicity for your site, you would be best served by submitting it to Google, since the majority of people find my site that way (even more than those who directly request it through bookmarks or typing in the URL manually). Rixort isn't popular enough for you to see a substantial rise in traffic simply by me linking to your site.
Q. What's the deal with the server error pages?
A. No-one likes to run into error pages, but sometimes they're unavoidable. So I've tried to make my pages cheerful and even humorous to help relieve some of the frustration of encountering one. The "Oi! Web Server! No!" line is inspired by Harry Enfield and Chums; if you haven't watched any of their shows then you might not understand the funny side.
Q. Will you design a site for me free of charge?
A. Sorry, but I simply don't have the time or resources to create free web sites for anyone who asks. If you want a personal web site on the cheap, download some free web templates and modify them to suit your needs or, better still, teach yourself HTML and web design so that you can do the job yourself. If you want a commercial site designed, pay a reputable company to do it for you.
To be brutally honest, I don't work for free unless it's for a community/charity site or I'm helping out one of my friends. I simply can't afford to work for free on commercial projects, because there's always other things that I need to be getting on with.
Having said that, I don't mind helping people out with HTML, PHP, JavaScript etc. You can contact me directly or ask your question on one of the forums I visit. It's just that I don't have enough time to commit to any major projects, especially when I'm already working on my own sites and those of other people who I've already offered to help.
Q. Will you host a site for me free of charge?
A. Much as I'd love to provide free hosting for all the communities I support, I simply cannot afford to do so. Hosting costs a lot of money, even more so here in the UK than in the US, and I just don't have the financial resources to fund such a venture, much as I would like to.
You may have noticed that I do host some community websites, so the exclusion isn't complete. However, all the community sites that I host (for free) are those that I strongly believe/participate in. Also, I contacted the owners/maintainers of those sites personally to offer them free hosting. So if you're not contacted directly by me, please don't come asking for free hosting. I simply can't trust everyone with access to my server, and even if I could I don't have the resources to supply all the sites with enough bandwidth for their requirements.
Q. Which other websites are you responsible for?
A. I've built websites for a variety of commercial organisations over the past three years; most of which can be found on my online portfolio. One site that I've been involved with for three years, and still work on, is Astley Hire, which wouldn't disappear without me knowing.
Q. How come you're always working on something new, and seem to have so many projects on at any one time?
A. I can't stand standing around idle — I have to be constantly active otherwise I get bored. Even whilst I'm waiting for lectures to start, you'll often see me scribbling rough notes on a scrap of paper because I've just had some inspiration for a new or existing idea. Apart from when I'm asleep, I'm usually thinking of a project to work on. If I ever appear to be in a world of my own, it's because I'm lost in thought.
Q. What are the technical specifications of your site?
A. Almost every page you'll see on this site is built in XHTML 1. There's some client-side JavaScript here and there, and all the server-side programming is taken care of by scripts written in PHP with MySQL providing database capabilities, via the PEAR::DB database abstraction layer. Almost every line of code has been hand-coded by yours truly, and the majority of the scripts have been written completely from scratch without third party utilities. Hosting for my site is provided by my own web hosting business.
The site also employs CSS to set up the fonts, margins, colours etc. Using the default stylesheet, you should see all body text rendered in 13px Lucida Grande, with descending font sizes for the headers in the same font. Of course this assumes that you have these fonts installed on your computer, but on most Windows machines these fonts should automatically be available (some Mac and Linux boxes will also come with some of the fonts pre-installed, if not the stylesheet will fall back to other choices).
Any browser should be capable of displaying the basic text on each page, even if images, CSS and JavaScript are disabled. Of course, the site won't look quite as good if you don't have a modern browser capable of supporting CSS, but you should still be able to read each page regardless. The PHP is handled completely on the server-side, so it doesn't matter what browser you use in that respect.