About this site ...
Purpose
There are three main objectives to my site:
- 1) To allow potential customers to find me via search engines etc.
- 2) To provide a stimulus for those who see my pages to explore some fields I find interesting, and to allow those with similar interests to find me so we can correspond. (I've included some pages etc. which contain very little material as yet, but may still get caught by a search engine. I may add to them later, of course.)
- 3) To save me time by providing information on certain topics about which I often get asked.
The site isn't really "under construction" as I don't have the time to spend on improving it (let alone on putting in fancy designs or graphics -- words are my speciality!), but if you've got any constructive suggestions, new links to include or old links to update, etc. I might take them on board.
History
The site was first created in around 1994, shortly after CompuServe first allowed access to the "new" world of the Web. It has changed remarkably little since then (something of which I am actually proud), and was hosted on CompuServe for over a decade, although I did for a time use the short URL http://i.am/ozaru (now abandoned as they started charging), rather than http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/bj1/benjones.htm (which was often misread as ...bjL... or misheard as ...bjONE...). Later I switched to www.ozaru.freeserve.co.uk and now http://www.ozaru.net.
Recently I have spent more time on a site for my work, at www.japanesetranslations.co.uk.
Technical details
All of the site was created from hand, using the basic OS/2 system editor and/or Windows Notepad etc., with various shareware graphic apps for the pictures. I test for dead links etc. once every few months (recently I discovered the wonderful Xenu's Link Sleuth, which has helped me get 95% of the links working), and once in a blue moon I check how it displays in a variety of browsers. Unfortunately some browsers are so tolerant of bad self-taught code that the site is nowhere near W3 compliant, but one day it will be ... :-)