About


About Inner Mind

The Inner Mind came into existence back in the 1990s. The World Wide Web (WWW) was just getting started and it looked like it was going to be the next big thing. I wanted to learn more about it so I took a class at a local college on building web sites. To practice what I was learning I needed some content so chose two of my favorite shows at the time, the Outer Limits and Young Indiana Jones. At that time the WWW did not very much information on these shows so after the class ended I published the site on June 18, 1996 using space on my internet provider at the time, peak.org.

Over the next couple of years more content for the shows was added. Two more sections were created, one with episode guides I created for other television shows. The second section had Siskel and Ebert's yearly top 10 lists and schedules for the U.S Sci-Fi cable channel. The site generated enough interest that I decided to give it a more permanent home. I also wanted a domain name so I looked at all the shows I had done episode guides for ideas and chose innermind.com which was available at that time. I also got a web host and opened the site there on October 1, 1998. Some interactive functionality of the time was added to some sections which included guest books, discussion forums, and voting polls.

After the Outer Limits and Young Indiana Jones shows stopped creating new episodes interest in these shows declined over the years. In the early 2010s the interactive features were dropped because they were mostly getting just spam. The site still gets a steady stream of traffic so I maintain it as a place for people to find the information on the site. Some sections continue to have a bit of new content added. In 2011 the section for the GUIquotes program was added and in 2013 the Proportions Calculator app section was added.

The web master of the Inner Mind is Loren Heisey. I created and maintain all of the site. A few of the television sections had content contributed by others which I try to acknowledge in those sections. From this site it should be obvious I enjoy following various television shows. I also enjoy hiking and exploring the greater outdoors some of which can be found at the Picturesque Photo Views photography blog. My professional background is developing and testing computer hardware, first for Hewlett-Packard and later for Sony. After that I did freelancing involving computer hardware. Currently I am a web developer.

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About Website

When I first started creating websites in the 1990s they only used HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). This was because at that time CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) were just a proposal. Even though by the time I moved the website to innermind.com in 1998 CSS had been released it took some time for browsers to incorporate the features of CSS. Since I wanted the website to be viewable by as many people as possible I did not use CSS. For positioning things on a page tables were used.

For providing interactive functionality such as guest books, discussion forums, and voting polls CGI (Common Gateway Interface) was used which was a popular way to do this at the time. All of the CGI scripts were implemented with the Perl programming language. The CGI scripts were written by others though I typically made some minor changes and improvements.

By 2010 CSS was available in all browsers and I had some time so the Episode Guide section was converted to use CSS. Template Toolkit was used as a template processing system for generating the web pages. This allowed common elements like headers, footers, and navigation to be in a file which is incorporated into all of the pages when the templatizing is run. The Template Toolkit uses the Perl programming language. When the Software section was added it used Template Toolkit.

The Doctor Who Quiz was added in 2010 which uses Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Ajax allows parts of a web page to be changed without reloading the entire page. This makes for a faster response when users enter their answer. The Episode Guides Quotes was added in 2011 which will display random quotes from files containing quotes from television shows. This uses the PHP programming language which is widely used for web development.

The Inner Mind website is static which in my case means all pages on the website are complete and changes are only seen when I upload a changed page to the website. All editing of the pages is done on my computer. After all the edits of source pages are made a program is run which uses the templates to generate the final page to be uploaded to the website.

The Picturesque Photo Views photography blog was started in 2014. For various reasons it was put on a different web host and given its own domain name. It uses the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) which runs on the PHP programming language and uses MySQL for the database where the site content and settings are stored. The website is dynamic which in simple terms means each page is generated every time any visitor to the website views that page. Any published change is seen the next time the page is viewed. All editing of the blog posts are done on the website using WordPress. This does allow both my sister and I to create and change blog posts even though we are located in different parts of the country.

The Outer Limits, Syfy Schedule, Movie Lists and Young Indiana Jones sections of the Inner Mind website were given makeovers in 2019 followed by the Episode Guide and Software sections in 2020. This included using CSS to give a better viewing experience for phone thru desktop screen sizes. Handlebars templates were used and Panini was used for the site generation. Both programs use the JavaScript programming language. Before starting I created a boilerplate so there was a completely functional site to begin each section. I made this boilerplate available on GitHub and the various things used to make the website are listed in the readme.

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