What's an etripper?
With all due apologies to Webster, American Heritage and others, "etripper" isn't going to be found in any dictionary (at least, not yet). That's the nice thing about English. If you can't find a word that expresses the concept you're trying to communicate, you just make it up.
e•trip•per (ē-trip-pər)
n. An individual attempting to make a living driving, taking pictures and using computers.
Who's the etripper?
This is the etripper in, well, I'm sure you can figure it out.
The etripper is Brian McKeever. At present, I live in St. Louis, Mo. For most of my professional life, I've been a computer programmer, system administrator, etc. A Swiss army knife with respect to computers and networking. This site shows the things that have given me a lot of joy over the years, visiting new places, driving and taking lots of pictures.
About this Site
This site is currently under heavy revision. I appreciate any patience you can offer. If you have any questions or comments, use the "contact" link above. I look forward to hearing from you.
Responsive Web Design
The site includes responsive web design responsive web design
elements (CSS3). The intent
is for it to degrade gracefully (look acceptable) at very different
screen resolutions. It should even look acceptable on modern handheld
smart devices and touch pads*. With the proliferation of mobile
devices today, this is almost a must. Luckily the boon in this new
class of devices coincided with the development of well-designed
standards-based browsers from almost every vendor. (About
time!!!)
If you're using a desktop machine or a laptop, and have a modern browser like FireFox, Chrome or Safari, when the browser window is resized, things should move about, but should still look okay. On very narrow devices like pads or phones, a more simplified site emerges. You can see it if you squeeze the width or your browser to less than about 800 pixels. You may even notice that the picture on this page scales down as the screen narrows. So, if you don't like the layout, stretch the screen in and out until you get something you like.
Navigation
I suppose that if you have to explain the navigation of your site, you didn't do a very good designing it. However, all sites are not created equal. If I had designed a boring corporate site, hidden navigation or features is not what you want. However, on this type of site, the rules are a bit more lax and maybe I can make things a bit more interesting. Some things to note:
- The contact link above in the main navigation is a toggle. Click it once to open. Click it again to close. Clicking anywhere in the contact information closes the contact pane.
- When you're on a page, the navigation link for that page at the top is a different color than the links to the other pages in the top navigation. When you click on that link, the content slides off the page. Click it again and it slides back. This is because, I spent a lot of time choosing the background and making it look purdy [sic]. Why not let everyone see it! Give it a try!
- While designing the site, it became useful to have the height and width of the browser window displayed on the pages. I decided to leave it on the final site. It's in the lower right-hand corner of the screen along with the date the page was made and the name of the page. If you squeeze the width of the browser on your non-mobile device, the size appears as the last line of the page.
- When you see the little icon, it means you can click on it to go to an
external site or choose, via a popup, your choice of several
destinations. For instance, it's used on the random page to allow you to search for the author
of the quotes via various search engines.
- On long pages, you'll be scrolling down. This puts the navigation way at the top of the page. Not very convenient. To adapt to this, if you move your mouse to the left of the main content window (into the blank white area), a popup navigation menu will appear close to the same level and to the left of the mouse pointer. It allows you to navigate to any of the main pages as well as simply scroll up to the top (if you are not at the top already) or go back to previous page in your browser's history. Moving your mouse out of that area hides the menu. If you're using a touch device, tap the same area to bring up the popup navigation. Tap again to close the navigation.
*I do not normally condone not making sites backward compatible with older browsers. In most cases, this site will work fairly well with older browsers (such as IE6). However, navigating or taking advantage of the features on this site will be a challenge for non-smart-phone mobile devices.