History

A Brief History

Originally this site began as "Adam Lein's Bookmarks" in mid 1995. Using Netscape 1, it featured lists of links as well as a picture of me and my motorcycle along with a tiled background image. The site was created by editing the HTML file generated by Netscape to use as the bookmarks menu.

With the advent of Netscape 2.0, I redesigned the site to make use of many of the new tags. This site was called "Adam Lein's cool" who's title was suggested by my friends (as it is during every redesign), and featured a Java applet animation of me bicycling across the screen. Also, I made an animated GIF of a keyboard that typed out the name "ADAM" and a JavaScript pop up for displaying my artwork.

Next came Netscape 3.0 and IE3. Along which, I designed the new "Adam Lein's Puzzled" web site which made use of a number of the new tags that IE3 offered as well as some Flash technology from Macromedia. This site was extremely bandwidth intensive at the time however, and was deemed unsuitable for average users.

Then with IE4, I created "Adam Lein's Real" web site. A dark earth toned site design which concentrated more on content than fluff. It still used frames and had numbered links for access to the content in each section. I also started using CSS and dynamic HTML for some of the programming here.

And then we had "Adam Lein's Insight"! This site was designed to be easy to update and easy to alter. With FrontPage extensions, I can change things directly on the server without having to use FTP. It's also designed for simple navigation (as always) and ease of use. Again we've cut down on the fluff and other distracting annoyances.

During the spring of 2000, "Adam Lein's Insight" went through a number of enhancements, including a move to an NT4 IIS4 web server and then to IIS5 and Windows 2000 AS. This allowed me to create dynamic secondary navigation using XML and FrontPage categories... which makes adding content a matter of creating a new page (using my online template), adding the content, and saving the page with the proper category checked off. Since the categories server side component does not allow for specific tag editing, I used a secondary style sheet to control the appearance of the tables that are generated dynamically.

In the Fall of 2000, I added shared bottom and top borders which are added to my content pages dynamically from single border files. The top border also includes dynamic links to previous and next documents within the section. The title of the page is also displayed automatically in the top border, within a style sheet based gradient blend. On my Katana motorcycle page, there are a series of thumbnail images that link to a single active server page which loads the selected image and displays it's file name in the title bar. Another minor enhancement was some new main category icons which combine style sheet hover effects with text and images.

As of January 1st 2001, my site was rereleased with a new design and a new name; Adam Lein's Millennium. Firstly, all content pages were renamed with the ASP extension. Then I simply added a server side include statement to the beginning and end of each page. The entire user interface was rebuilt to reside in two include files (a beginning and an end). Now, my beginning include file was what does most of the work. The end file only closes off the open tags. So, I can control any user interface changes from basically a single file. I wrote code for this file that would alter the appearance depending on what primary section the user was visiting. This is visible by the different UI imagery and the button style differences. I also included code in the user interface file that would alter the design drastically for viewing on a small screened Pocket PC Device. To see how this looks, click here. To see a comparison of a page in this site viewed in a Pocket PC and on Internet Explorer 5.5, click here. My single-file user interface makes alterations much easier than ever before!

May 8, 2001 - Another redesign!! This one I like to call "Adam Lein's Insight XP." This one removes the banner ads from the previous design and also integrates a database driven user interface with dynamically generated pop-up menus. As with the previous design, this site makes use of my independent UI technique. We've also got a great new color scheme that compliments the browser interface design of MSN Explorer, as well as my personal desktop theme, and other normal browsers. And, not to worry, Pocket PCs and Windows CE is still detected and supported on all pages.

December 1, 2002 - "Adam Lein's Insight v.8.0" now online. This design has a similar look to the previous version, but now with more imagery in the user interface. It's also got much more database driven content, including database driven galleries, and a random quote generator on the home page. I've also added a bunch of new content. The new galleries display thumbnails defined in the database and then the page that displays the full version also has Previous and Next buttons which allow the user to scroll through the other images. The Prev/Next buttons are also generated with server side scripting. We've got a password protected members section, and my very own web based database maintenance application. The "section" variable identifier on each page (which tells the UI how to adjust to it's location), is now generated dynamically through a query to the database which finds out it's section name based on server variables that determine the local file's filename. The programming is implemented on every page as an include file. Also each primary section page includes a database generated list of the pages associated with that section along with a gallery if applicable. Other ASP scripting is used to generate CSS class names for table properties and link items.

July 28, 2007 - Wow! It's been forever since I did an update to this site! Well, it's about time. 6 years of "Adam Lein's Insight" and now we're up to "Adam Lein's Style".