Acknowledgements
Our goal with this web site is to inform, to entertain, and to share ideas with others within the global village of cyberspace. People can share their interests with others who have similar interests in an eclectic array of subjects.
These pages will be continuously updated, altered, and appended. Updates and relevant changes to the web site will be announced at RBkor on Twitter. We intend to maintain relevance to the present and respect for the past as we expand the scope of this site beyond its present state of content.
Style and Presentation (CSS)
Presentation deserves a high priority, especially if we have some regard for the work of Professor Herbert
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980). Issues of presentation were important in book and magazine publishing, as well as in film and television. When the
Internet arrived, new challenges and new opportunities arose. Web-page designs, as well as textbook designs, are very often overdone and graphical content can obscure the substantive content. Professor McLuhan forewarned us back in the 1960s in his book
The Media Is the Message. McLuhan is also the author of
.The Global Village. Video sessions with McLuhan are also available on
Youtube. A particularly nerdy discussion between McLuhan and author Norman Mailer is posted at
Mailer and McLuhan.
Technical Stuff
To construct this web site, we scanned, studied, and used elements from many sources. Occasions arose where we googled to find a quick solution to a vexing problem. One tends to forget all those diligent people out there in Cyberland who labor hour after hour over a few lines of code, and then, share the results of that diligence with millions of others in the global village. All of us in Cyberland at one time or another have searched the ether for answers to our questions. Others among us read the source code of pages we view in our browsers. We often discover ways to solve coding problems by reading the work of others, which is what we call "education". At one time or another, we all need a diet of new ideas and at other times we all need some help.
Below is a list of a few sites that have had at least some impact on this website, some sites much more than others. Help someone today, and tomorrow, you may very well feel a little bit better about the world and about yourself.
This web site was built with several text editors, including the infamous Windows Notepad. The most used editor, however, was PSPad, a free programmers' text editor that has a fair share of programmer-friendly highlighting options.
Another programmers' text editor that has been around for awhile is Netepad++, which offers many functions and customizations and is also free.
Another very useful open source editor from Adobe is called Buckets. Like other editors, many useful functions are available. Unfortunately, I have not been able to activate the HTML preview function. PsPad does have a useable preview HTML preview function.
Neither Notepad++ or PSPad adds a lot of useless code that we too often see in dedicated HTML editors. Color and highlighting help to keep track of different code segments.
A Note of Caution: When downloading "freeware" always check for ad-ware, tracking, and other nuisance viruses. PSPad is available in several different forms and from several URLs, including CNET. Although I usually feel somewhat secure when downloading from CNET, I have sometimes found so--called "spyware" in their downloads. I am a bit surprised, because the parent of CNET is CBS, which most of us would probably "trust". The link we are providing here was clean and I hope that it is still clean for you.
Although a bit advanced, the ideas and examples displayed at Astral Consultancy are straightforward and not a major challenge to comprehend.
Their article, "Popup Style Window Using Elements", inspired some of our coding.
Many styling code snippets can be found at
css-tricks. Some interesting and useful presentation ideas are offered.
Popup tooltips are an elegant way to enrich a web page. After experimenting with the code from this site, we began to modify and play with it. There are other ways to style pop-up messages, but this does work. Some layouts may act erratically, but usually by manipulating several of the position parameters, stability can be achieved.
Quirksmode.com wrestles with the problems encountered when trying to display a page on different browsers and on different devices, i.e. tablets and small-screen phones. Meandering through the site has also jogged some creative ideas with regard to presentation.
Quackit.com is highly useful for fledgling web designers.
Wikipedia:
Wikipedia is a free-online encyclopedia. Nearly everything on the site is licensed for free use by anyone on the planet. The site operates on donations. All of us who use this phenomenal sanctuary of human knowledge should consider makng a contribution.
Anyone with a little experience with the inner workings of the Internet soon realizes that a lot of people offer free software that is worthy for use by the best of the programmers out there in Cyberland. Many of these free programs are better in some ways than their commercial counterparts. Although many of these software packages issued under a GNU license agreement are not jammed with numerous features, they do provide the clean functionality that I personally prefer.
Photography
A rich collection of infra-red and ultraviolet photography by Bjørn Rørslett can be seen at www.naturfotograf.com/index2.html
"NightScapes", photographed by Royce-Bair, captures the splendor and awesomeness of the evening sky.
Science Is a "Candle in the Dark"
A final note of appreciation to the late Carl Sagan for his contributions to knowledge. He eloguently warned against prejudice and mass hysteria in his book The Demon Haunted World, published by Random House Publishing Group (© Carl Sagan 1996; ISNN 978-0-345-40946-1). Scientists and astronomers remember him for his extensive research and lucidly written publications. Philosophers remember Dr. Sagan for his book, Pale Blue Dot. His manuscripts were always flawlessly prepared for publication and nearly eliminated the need for copyeditors to mark-up his pages; he was meticulous.
Visit Korea
Several agencies of various branches of government in Korea offer a variety of information that would be especially interesting for tourists:
Visit Korea