About the Wizworks Collection

These pages contain a collection of bookmarks on various topics which I have collected over several years, and which I have found either useful, interesting, or just amusing. A boldface link means only that it's one of my favourites.

Originally, I only needed to put my bookmarks where I could get at them from more than one place. The concept, and the site, grew from there. The collection is far from complete in any area. A few pages are fairly comprehensive and will lead you to other link sites which are even better. The rest are not much more than small random collections of sites.

I also wanted to see what I could do about building a website with minimal tools, minimal fancy techniques (no Flash, no Java, no pop-ups, etc.), minimal training, and minimal upkeep. You get to decide for yourself whether a website really has to have all that fancy stuff that loads down a system and occasionally crashes my browser. You'll find that these pages load quickly because they're pure text. There are no graphics other than the occasional icon, except on the home page. The graphic file there is one of the largest files on this site, at about 39KB. In other words, no page should take longer than about 15 seconds to download over a 33Kbps connection even at less than full speed.

Netscape Composer 4.08, 4.7 and 7.1, and lately, Composer's open-source successor KompoZer 0.77, have been used to prepare these pages. Some of the older pages may therefore look best in Netscape. The more recently-done pages have had some hand-coding to bring them into compliance with W3C standards – those pages will have the W3C HTML 4.01 icon at the bottom and should render properly in any browser that supports the internationally-observed W3C HTML 4.01 Transitional standard. Internet Explorer (at least to version 6.00) does not always support that standard.

The Verdana font is used throughout. This font was designed primarily as a screen font by Microsoft for use in Web browsers and other applications where display resolutions are low and screen legibility is particularly important. Until August, 2002, the Microsoft web fonts were available free on Microsoft's site, but were apparently withdrawn because of abuse of copyright. You may be able to find them elsewhere on the Web if you don't already have them with Windows 98 or later.

Now that you've found this site, you might as well enjoy it too. Most of the links are commented – please let me know if the information has become inaccurate, or if the link itself is dead. Both are quite possible – I don't check them regularly. But you'll find the date the link was last edited at the end of the comment as (m/yy). That's there mostly for me, so that I know what sites are overdue for checking. If no date appears, that only means that I haven't checked the link since July, '01.

My e-mail address is below. It's slightly munged to discourage spammers' web bots that look for addresses the spammers can use. Just substitute an "@" symbol in the appropriate place.

If you find this site useful, feel free to pass its URL to anyone you like. Google (my favourite Websearch engine) has picked up the site, and so have several others. If you're interested in page hit statistics, just click on the Site Meter icon at the bottom of any page. Site Meter provides the data collection and statistics generation in return for that little bit of advertising.

You'll also find links to several articles I have written, most of which were published quite some time ago. They were aimed primarily at the novice user who is looking for a little light-hearted help in understanding some of the aspects of the computer system she or he is trying to use. For a list of those articles,with descriptions, click here.

Help yourself to whatever appeals to you. If this site is useful enough to bookmark it, I suggest that you set up your bookmark to point to http://wizworks.ca/index.htm, or even just wizworks.ca. That reference should forward you to the site's real location no matter where I move it to. Bookmarking any page in the usual fashion will pick up the site's present location at http://mypage.uniserve.ca/~rumple/.