About Square Gear
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On this site I give away fonts, rate football teams, and provide information on some of my hobbies. But what this site is really all about is giving myself a place to play around and experiment with webby technologies. As a result, I'm using all sorts of fanciness here in order to learn about it.
I've become a big proponent of web standards. The best way for the web to live up to its potential is by getting away from browser- and brand-specific tags and insisting on software that properly conforms to the standards that have been defined. That will lead to the widest possible compatibility. With this in mind I have made sure that all my pages are validated as HTML 4.01 strict.
My efforts at standards compatibility have lead me to dislike the use of tables for web page layout. That's not really what they are meant for. Plus they are often really difficult to work with and hard to update. A minor layout change can be quite a chore. But what else can you do? Style sheets to the rescue! This entire site is laid out completely with style sheets, and they've been validated, too. The only tables you'll find on this site contain actual tabular data.
I'm also a big proponent of accessability. Not everybody can see web pages the same way I do. I'm referring here to physical disabilities as well as the simple matter of what kind of device you're browsing on. My hope is that my page will be readable regardless of whether you're using a browser, a reader, a braille device, a PDA, or a cell phone. Using cascading style sheets for layout is a big help in this. CSS allows the format of my page to change to fit the device you are using to read it. Even if your browser doesn't support CSS all my content should still be readable. Additionally, all my pages are WAI Level Double A conformant.
I think that the best way to keep the government from imposing regulations on what we can put on the internet is for those of us who put stuff there to regulate ourselves. One way to do that is to rate the content of web pages so that the filtering functions on browsers can be used effectively. I've rated my site using ICRA.
I'm also learning about Server Side Includes, a simple yet powerful tool that makes developing pages and maintaining a site a lot easier. I've used them extensively throughout this site. That's why all my pages end in .shtml instead of .html.
About the Name
Square Gear Productions? Squaregear.net? What's up with that?
The Square Gear name has a kind of odd history. It all started with a brain teaser I read involving gears of different shapes. It got me wondering if you could make square gears that actually worked. I decided it was possible and to prove it to myself I made a 3D model of some square gears on my computer. I liked the way they looked. When I was done with them they looked kind of ponderous and industrial. So I threw in a factory and town background for them and liked it even better. The name suggested itself and I threw it in. Altogether I thought it made a nice looking logo. I really had no need for a name and logo, though, so I just saved it and left it on my computer.
That was quite a while ago. So eventually I decide to get my own domain and make a fancy web site. I wanted to get mattwelch.com or matthewwelch.com or mmw.com but they were all taken. Eventually I realized that I was going to have to come up with some other name. That's when I remembered the old logo and name I had once come up with. The problem was that squaregear.com was already taken. But at that point I was sick of hunting for something so I decided that squaregear.net would do just fine. And that's how I ended up with this name.