About This Site

The first version of www.fadden.com was entirely hand-coded with a text editor, but that got old quickly. The first major revamp was done with with Microsoft FrontPage back when that was shiny and new. Site navigation was managed with the FrontPage navigation system, which was clunky but functional.

The next refresh was done with FrontPage 2000 in late 2001, during the "browser wars", when major sites were either putting significant work into making their pages look good on multiple browsers, or throwing up their hands and saying "looks best on Netscape". Sites that made heavy use of frames were giving fits to non-desktop browsers. I built a site that would work equally well with any browser, and loaded quickly over 56K modem connections, which is another way of saying it was boring and devoid of style no matter what you used to view it.

Over the next several years I added a few things and removed others, but left the site generally intact.

FrontPage evolved into Expression Web, which had four major releases before Microsoft discontinued support for it in December 2012. In January 2015 I downloaded Expression Web 4 and used it to rework my site. There were some better editors available, but EW4 got the job done and only crashed occasionally.

The updated site used HTML and CSS. It looked better and was easier to navigate, though at heart it was still a web site designed by an engineer. Much of it was coded by hand as part of learning about CSS. The only editor-specific feature I used was Expression Web's "design-time includes", to pull in common elements like top and side navigation menus. I cleaned up most of the grotty HTML bits, though some lingered on.

In July 2021 I restructured the underlying HTML, switching from XHTML-Transitional to HTML 5, and wrote a custom script to drop in the navigation menus and other common elements. The primary goal was to incorporate "responsive web design" elements to make Google stop complaining that the site didn't work well on mobile devices. The general look of the site didn't change, but on narrow screens the side navigation bar disappears and a menu icon is added to the top nav bar.

The "fadden.com" graphic on the main page uses a close-up of a microwaved GD-R disc for the background.

The text and photographs on this site are copyright by Andy McFadden, all rights reserved, except where noted otherwise. Screen captures from games and corporate logos are the property of their respective owners.