This site started out as a single web page in April, 1998 on the space that aol gave to all aol members. Of course that was back when I was still on aol... I gave up the training wheels a couple years ago.

Before I left aol I put a placeholder in there directing visitors over here. Surprisingly, as of this writing that placeholder is still there. After a while, the page grew to several, with dozens of images. It wasn't long before I quickly outgrew the 2MB allotted, and I started adding content elsewhere, but still linked from that original home page. Initially Xoom gave me something like 20MB for free, then that kept increasing until the point it was unlimited. Over time, I added more and more pages and images.

I put up a couple of MP3s of original songs, but Xoom filtered out anything with the mp3 extension, so I had to make users manually add the extension after they downloaded the songs. Somewhere in there, a fellow cruiserhead offered free web space on his domain, Cruiserpages.com, to people who were on the Land Cruiser Mailing List, and I took him up on it. I moved much of my Land Cruiser content there, while still maintaining content on both AOL and on Xoom. Somewhere in there, CBS bought Xoom, then came the dot-com crash and Xoom disappeared entirely with no warning whatsoever. Since I had links across three different domains, it was quite a scramble to redo all my pages and links, and up until now, I have no idea if I still have anything that might still point there.

After a few years, Cruiserpages.com went away as well, and I realized that the down side to free web space is, well, you get what you pay for. It had become a royal pain in the patootie to have to move everything every few years, and then re-point all my links. By this time, several years ago, Network Solutions had released it's death-grip on domain registration, and web hosting had become much more competitive (read: cheaper!). So I went ahead and got the Rzeppa.org domain and a regular, paid web host. I moved all my stuff there, redid my links and focused on adding high quality content, primarily mechanical tech tips and progress pages on my restoration project. My other pages languished as they were. Having gone through it a number of times, I really did not want to change everything, so the whole mess was kind of like adding more and more plaster to a cast. Still, the stale content and mish-mash organization kind of bothered me. I knew I could do better, and also knew what a huge amount of work it was going to be to do what I am doing right now.

When I first started out on that original web page, I built it using AOL's page builder software (or whatever they call it). I quickly reached it's limitations. I worked with Frontpage for a while, and while it was far superior to Pagebuilder, I had a heck of a time making it do what I wanted it to. It seemed like it was constantly adding junk code that didn't do anything but take up space and resources, and when I wanted to do certain things, I still had to go into the code and manually code it. I switched to Netscape Composer, and liked it a lot better. It still created junk code and I still had to manually code stuff after Netscape went as far as it could, but it was an improvement. Eventually I went through several years and a large amount of content creation where I built everything from hand using simple Notepad - no way was that going to put stuff in there I didn't want, and I 100% control over all the code. As you might imagine it was fairly tedious though, even copying and pasting fair amounts of code which was re-used on multiple pages. Finally a little over a year ago, I went over to the dark side and got Dreamweaver and haven't looked back. Not only is it a major time saver, but I could figure out the nuances of using tables to position everything where I wanted it, and still go into code view and do as much manual coding as I wished.

As I type this (December 2007), I am re-doing the entire site, giving it a cleaner, more uniform look. And, hopefully organized in a more logical manner - I've thought about this redesign for most of a year and finally have gotten around to it. While I've never been a huge fan of scripts, for this redesign I've gone ahead and used a few simple ones, such as the roll-over buttons and the slide shows on some of the main pages. Computers have gotten faster, more and more people have broadband, so I've relaxed my personal design rules somewhat. I still want the site to be usable for those on dial up; so many sites these days simply can NOT be accessed on dial up. Another thing I've done is make the layout as reasonably friendly to a variety of screen sizes and resolutions as possible. Even though newer notebooks can all be viewed at 1024x768 or more, and virtually all desktop monitors exceed that, I still see a lot of notebooks in use with 14" and even 12" screens, and I think it's really hard to view anything on those at anything bigger than 800x600, so all these new pages are sized at 780 pix wide. You might still get a tiny bit of scroll bar on the bottom, but by and large you won't miss much horizontally.

If you've gotten this far, well, bless you! Hopefully this wasn't too boring. My main objective is to inform and entertain visitors on topics which are of interest to me. If you have any feedback, comments or criticism, feel free to contact me.

Cheers!

Jeff