about_hh.html

---
title: About - preface to the first edition (circa 1998)
keywords: about,about hilton harbour,why
layout: hh
---

<h2>What Hilton Harbour is</h2>

<p><img src='picture/illustration/ha.gif' width='150' height='74' alt='[Hilton Airlines]' title='Hilton Airlines' style='float:right'>
Hilton Harbour is an <strong>eclectic collection</strong> of writing by myself and people I know. It’s not really a blog, because blog’s hadn’t been invented when I started, so there’s no timeline other than the old-school <a href="new.html">What’s New</a> page.</p>

<p>My aim was always to publish more content than either graphics which say almost nothing, let alone a thousand words, or just a list of <a href="links.html" title="my favourite web sites">links</a>, which would be nothing more than <a href="meta_content.html" title="prose and cons: meta-content in the media">meta-content</a>. This way, I felt better about expressing strong opinions about other poeple's web sites. This hasn’t changed since the rise of blogs and sites based on third-party user-generated content, but there hasn’t been much new content here since 2007.</p>

<p>Hilton Harbour, to some degree, is a personal experiment in designing and implementing a web site that I started in the late 90’s. This is captured in the early technical design documents: my <a href="web_site_architecture.html">Web Site Architecture</a> guidelines and the <a href="web_page_design_principles.html">Web Page Design Principles</a>.</p>

<h2>Why Hilton Harbour exists</h2>

<p>Obviously, I'm hoping that each of these pages will one-day provide someone with some work-avoidance or <strong>something better to do than watch television</strong>. Perhaps less obviously, I hope that for each page in Hilton Harbour at least one person in the world will learn something new or think about a question that they have never asked themselves. Or just waste some time in <a href="european_cafe_watch.html">a cafe somewhere</a>.</p>

<p>Years ago, I was interested in <a href="http://www.theobvious.com/archive/1998/04/20.html">content syndication</a> and the idea of big sites <a href="http://www.theobvious.com/archive/1997/05/05.html"> mining content from independent content providers</a>, but that has played out a different way. Instead of finding content on third-party web sites, it turns out to be easier to create a web site to capture third-party content directly.</p>

<p>In any case, I still enjoy writing, playing with photos and trying to do the odd illustration.</p>

<h2>How Hilton Harbour is produced</h2>

<p>All of the HTML on these pages was coded <strong>by hand</strong> because I have yet to use a WYSIWYG Web page editor which I like. I once tried quite a few of the popular ones, and even liked a couple, but they still were not what I want. In the end I always ended up using a relatively basic text editor on OS X - <a href="http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/">TextWrangler</a> for the last few years.</p>

<p>As well as a text editor to code the pages, I have used a variety of validators, but none recently. Validation tools are essential but have gone out of fashion, and now we are trying to Judo the problem by using simpler mark-up such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown">Markdown</a>.</p>

<p>The pages are assembled from a standard <strong>page template</strong> and a bare HTML file for the content using <a href="https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll">Jekyll</a> running on <a href="http://pages.github.com">GitHub Pages</a>.</p>

<p>I usually use an <strong>Apple Macintosh</strong> to create these pages and the images, because I much prefer using <em>Mac OS</em> to any of the variants of <em>Microsoft Windows</em> and none of the other alternatives are practicable for me. For a few years I used <strong>Debian Linux</strong> at work, but now we have Macs there too. Anyway, it is not worth trying to explain why I use a Mac, although I suspect that anyone who had also used both <em>Mac OS</em> and <em>Windows</em> professionally for hundreds of hours or more each might be able to hazard a guess. Fortunately, perhaps, more people understand the difference since the iPhone.</p>

<p>Also, in a later change of heart on using graphics, I started sprinkling FamFamFam <a href="http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/">Silk</a> and <a href="http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/">Flag</a> icons on a few pages,
now replaced by emoji.</p>