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Site information

SuzyMcHale.com is my personal site for my interests. The subsites were originally contained in the original “Kosmonavtka” (Russian for “lady cosmonaut”) site at Yahoo!, but they grew, as sites seem to do!

New pages are added to the site only occasionally. My journal is the most active section.

Site history

I only began using the Internet in 2001. During that year I was writing some International Space Station-related fiction stories for myself and gathered a lot of material and links during my research, and thought that I could put this together in the form of a website. The “Kosmonavtka” site was first created at Yahoo! Geocities under the URL http://au.geocities.com/kosmonavtka2/, and first uploaded on 21 September 2003. (That URL is now inactive – see an old version of the site at Archive.org.) “Kosmonavtka”, Космонавтка, is Russian for “lady cosmonaut”; I could not think of a site name so that was the best I could come up with. It was intended to to provide information about the Russian space program that I felt was interesting and (hopefully) useful. In 2010 I renamed it to “RuSpace” (Russian Spaceflight). (See my RuSpace site information page for more.)

The site kept growing so it branched into separate sites. I created the Sergei Krikalyov site at http://au.geocities.com/krikalyov/ on 6 October 2004 and a couple of others (now defunct). I deleted these after opening suzymchale.com on 8 September 2005 and they are now subsites of this one.

I chose the domain name because it seemed the logical choice (I am no good at inventing imaginative site names) and, though not a commercial site, the .com ending is easy to remember. An alternate choice was kosmonavtka.com, but I would be forever having to explain to people what a “kosmonavtka” was, so suzymchale.com was the more practical choice.

The site is a personal, non-commercial site. It is on shared hosting, so it might be a bit slow sometimes, depending on how busy the other sites are.

If the domain name becomes unavailable or stops working for some reason, the hosted address is http://saturn.netwrx1.net/suzymchale/.

Some of the SuzyMcHale.com site is also at Archive.org. I have concealed the personal sections from search engines, so those pages won’t show up.

Browsers, HTML and CSS

The site is coded in HTML 4.01 Strict. (I do not like its successor, XHTML – see No to XHTML at Spartanicus.) Site encoding is UTF-8 (Unicode).

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional

The site uses Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) for visual formatting and div’s for page layout. Tables are only used for tablular data. I also use a print stylesheet, which modern browsers should support (though Firefox seems to have problems with printing! Opera is a better choice for printing). The header and footer won’t print (they are unnecessary).

It should look (mostly) OK in up-to-date browsers, though there may be minor display quirks. Older browsers, such as anything below Internet Explorer 6 (IE5, IE5.5), will mess up the display in places (Netscape 4 does not display the layout at all, though that is deliberate as I hid my stylesheets from it because it mangles them so badly).

See What every browser user should know at Webmatters, which has advice on how to use browser features. Browsers I would recommend using are Firefox or Opera; anything but Internet Explorer 6 (or lower)! The ageing IE6 is a security nightmare and a headache for web designers as it is not web standards-compliant. (See Browse Happy for more details; also Web standards compliance at Rad Geek, and Internet Explorer is dangerous.) IE7 looks to be a big improvement, but is only available to those with Windows XP SP2 or Vista.

I have deliberately kept the site design simple to make maintenance easier, and to load fast. I am also not much good at site design, i.e. graphics and such, and div layouts tend to be challenging because of differing browser implementations and bugs. The site design, such as it is, is my own (i.e. not a template).

The few articles stored on this site have different formatting from the main pages and open in a popup window, as I wanted to keep them separate from my main site (they are by other authors). The popup window script is from Accessify.com, and pages will display normally if Javascript is not enabled. Otherwise, I do not open external links in popup windows; a feature I find extremely aggravating! (See “The folly of target="_blank" ”)

Javascript is only used for visual enhancement (such as the “Zebra tables” script), but is not neccessary for the site to function.

The site is composed of plain static HTML pages, and uses server-side includes for the headers and footers.

Accessibility

I have tried to make my site reasonably accessible by using structured semantic HTML markup (e.g. h1, h2, etc. for headers, p for paragraphs, etc.). My code is tidy (well, I like to think so!). I use the alt attribute for images. The site is legible in a text-only browser, or with images turned off.

Spelling and grammar

I use a somewhat random mixture of American and British spelling (e.g. I use the American spelling of “color”, not the British “colour”, for the reason that I dislike the extra letters!). I try to write reasonably good English and not use excessive slang and colloquialisms (which I find irritating).

Miscellaneous notes

  • All links in the main content are underlined.
  • My creative work is licensed under the Creative Commons Deed – you can reproduce it on your own site for non-commercial use as long as you don’t claim it as your own! (i.e. plagarism) (Not that my stuff is worth copying, but I thought I better put that in.)
  • “Disclaimer: Some pages contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owners. It is my belief that this not-for-profit use on the web constitutes as “fair use” of the copyrighted material as is stated in section 107 of United States Copyright Law. If you are the original photographer/writer and would like them removed please let me know.”
  • Many photos on the site (from NASA, etc.) are linked to the pages from where I obtained them; there you can download higher-resolution versions. (Not hot-linked – small images are stored on this site.)
  • Emoticons: hold your mouse pointer over these little “faces” for a descriptive tooltip! :-)
  • Images for the headers are from the NASA Human Spaceflight Gallery and Spacetelescope.org.
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Link exchanges

People with non-spaceflight sites who have linked to me.

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