About my site... (Version française)
Me and computers

My first meeting with a computer happened in primary school in CM1 class when one day we had to type one name on the kyboard of a MO5 Thompson. Then I subscribed to the computer's club of my school where our teacher was teaching BASIC and LOGO.
My interest for programming was concretized few years later by the acquisition of an AMSTRAD CPC 6128 at home. First disapointed by its different functionment, I discovered in myself a passion for this friendly and easy machine, that I kept a long time, far after it became old-fashioned !
While keeping the precious dinausorus in some cupboard by nostalgy, I got used time after time to the functionment of PC's during the various practicals at school. At the moment we have got a PC pentium 200, which is not connected to the network (may be one day the local tarification will make us afford it ?)
My discovering of internet

I had already vaguely heard about an electronical mail system by internet, and I decided around September 96 to create my own email in order to exchange with Stella, my dutch penfriend, then another Irish friend, before my contact list grew up exponentially..
I used during 2 years fraudulently the PC's of the IUT GEA dpt in Toulouse, because the University of Toulouse III owned formerly only one computer for all the students !
How did I get the idea to create my "homepage" ?

The idea to create my site, like the several ones I was often landing on, by searching in Yahoo, had come already often to me, but as I didn't have too much information about how to create them and too less time, this remained a long time only a project. A friend of mine, Sylvain, showd me one day his own page, and explained to me how Geocities works. Back to school the year after, with an easy access to the net in the ENI, I decided to start, finding an advert of Tripod. The quick editor was simple and explanatory , and the first page of my site looked like this one !
The first headings that I was willing to make were rowing, music, and Ireland. Unfortunately, these headings opened out quite lately, because the only images I had for provision were the ones I could copy from the web, and the access to a scanner to make it nicer was difficult. But as a friend helped me, the site was decorated then with a few pictures "made by eric" and looked then like this around the end of the year 97-98.
The "boom" happened during my "erasmus" year in the university of Strathclyde, in Glasgow: 15 hours of courses per week, computer labs with 50 stations, scanners, etc.. All the headings about Scotland had born, plus some other new ones. I also got used with all the smoothnesses of HTML, et polished the old pages, that had suddently catch a lot of age.
As the site has been until now almost exclusivly dedicated to Scotland, I am trying to enrich it with new headings a bit more from my "sweet home", the erasmus year beeing finished and in order to repair this unfair thing... The most faithful visitors could have noticed that Eric's Webpage has recently been adorned with new headings like the Pyrenees Mountains or the french South West.
How do I build my site ?

The old quick page editor of the ancient version of Tripod, (version that I'm still using) allowed me to understand better some basic functions of the HTML. Very quickly, its possibilities beeing very limited, I started messing in the codes in order to get exactly the result I expected to my pages, then I got used to type them directly by hand. Luckily, the function copy allows me avoiding a big task of typing, and every new page is born from an existing one which was the most similar. Having a look the the source code preview from pages of other sites made me find how to do what I didm't know. The use of the instructions INPUT allowed me to build a little "office board" from where I can pilot directly each function of Tripod, making every task quicker. I've been using for a short time a new way of work by updating the site on my PC at home (which work in closed loop on the hard drive) while the program FTP expert allow me saving time without a laborious connection to the Tripod's Editor from France.
Concerning pictures, that's them which makes a site attracting, they are generally from 2 origins: the ones I imported from everywhere on the web, and those I scanned. For the scanner, I'm using a Hewlet Packard. A scale of 200% is sometimes necessary for small pictures. These ones, and even often the ones coming from anywhere else in the web, have generally a dye a bit insipid and blur, and needs to be "retouched"...(some ones accuse me to cheat !)
My trick is to save them in .BMP, open them with Microsoft Photo Editor, cut their borders and set an ideal contrast and luminosity bu "autobalance. Some of them still do not come satisfying need to be manually balanced, even by separate colour, as the dark ones are often too green after balance. After this, for most of them, a wee "sharp" effect of 1 makes them less blur, giving the illusion of a better definition. Finally, to make them take the less memory possible, I low the defininion (this has no consequence on the quality) at the minimum, then 10 pixels / cm, before I save and upload them in .JPG or .GIF.
Insane on enrichissing hobby ?

With a load of pages, hundreds of images, 40 MB of memory space and a links network worthy a spagettis dish, in a few times my site has taken a dimension a bit demented... Of course, the maintainance and the updating of such a big web site requires a great personnal investment... But above all, this works represents an effort of imagination and simplicity in order to please its visiors, volunteers or not (in this case to make them not go away) rather than pure programming. The creation of a new page from the frame of another one (ex: new mountain trip) takes itself a ridiculously short time. The important is the inside. Personally I don't know any more enrichissing work than presenting our interests to the potential spectators of the whole world...
When will it be finally finished ?

Never (even if sometimes I'm thinking "this time, yes")