The Purpose

Essentially, Redstroke is my personal web-based marketing campaign. I use it as a springboard for the messages and media that I want to share with individuals, organizations, or the world. Sometimes I'm serious, sometimes I experiment, and sometimes I just play. But whenever I need to broadcast something to the outside world, Redstroke.com is ready and waiting.

It should be noted that Redstroke is meant to be more timeless than timely. It is not necessarily designed with the here and now in mind. The whole site in general, especially the journal, is rather meant to be complete at any given time. The idea is that no matter when I'm gone for good, Redstroke will be suitable for somebody in the future to look back and read. Thus, you will not find daily updates and constant commentary on contemporary happenings.

The History

I say the official birthdate of Redstroke.com is December 17, 1998. I did some preliminary work on it before then, but that's the first date I posted a journal entry, and thus the only real "official" record I have. My inspiration for the site format came from several sources, the most prominent of which was the Garden of Eden. While Eve's page and mine don't look anything alike, if you look hard, you can see some basic elements they have in common. I built the main page over the Christmas break between two semesters at LSU in 1998. Since then, I have continuously adjusted the content, but the basic design and purpose has remained the same.

The Design

Black, red and white are generally safe colors to put together. They work. But each color was also chosen for a particular meaning. The black represents the unknown, especially new experiences that may both frighten and excite us. Black is forbidden, but I also find it alluring. We all have to face black if we ever wish to grow. The red represents the passion we have to explore the unknown of the world and of ourselves. It lashes out in a brave stroke, slicing open a wound in the otherwise content black. Red is the mark I wish to leave—that I think it is our duty as fellow humans to leave—to the world. The white represents the inspiration we find in others to travel into the black. I can only hope that somebody, somewhere, might find motivation in these white words.

The Redstroke logo is a scan of an actual red stroke I made with acrylic red paint on bright white paper.

Redstroke's basic design has hardly changed since its inception in 1998. My goals to maintain an intuitive, fast and backward-compatible design have led me to ban such exotic technologies as Javascript and Flash. Redstroke is compatible with very old browsers, very decrepit computers and (hopefully) very computer illiterate people. If you know how to recognize and click a link, you should know how to use this site. Also, you will not find popups, background music, blinking text or cute animation anywhere on the site. The people who invented those technologies should die a slow and painful death at my merciless hands. That said, if you have any suggestions on the design, please let me know!

Geeky Info (technical synopsis)

Redstroke lives at Hostway.com, but my email goes other places. I designed the site all by my lonesome using HoTMetaL Pro and TextPad. The entire site is static, as I do not want to put forth the effort and expense to make it dynamic, and I am not satisfied with the quality of any canned dynamic solutions available at this time. Contrary to what some of the mouseovers on the graphics might try to make you believe, I created them all with Adobe Photoshop 5.0-7.0.  Redstroke pages are tested with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer before being posted to the server.  I sometimes perform spot-checks with really old Netscape and Mosaic versions just to make sure I'm not doing anything too kinky with the pages. If you have any further questions about the site, contact Van.

Content Suitability

Because the content type on this site varies from usually completely innocent to sometimes sexual and violent, I have no blanket rating system for the entire site. However, I make my best effort to individually rate pages which contain content that some parents may not consider suitable for their young children. While I do not feel that anything I write here is damaging to any person at any age, I recognize the right parents have to make that decision for their own young children. I register pages that I consider to be of concern for some parents with the Internet Content Rating Association, and embed the appropriate information in the document to notify any web filtering software of content type.

I rate content at my discretion alone, and do not guarantee its suitability. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of each parent to regulate or not regulate content that his or her child accesses.

I am not responsible for content outside of this site, no matter if I link to it or not.

I do not offer any pornography, have no desire to offer pornography, and couldn't afford the bandwidth even if I did want to offer pornography.

While I welcome discussion of and disagreement with anything I write, I will not entertain any requests to remove or change content based on the idea that it may be offensive to some people. I honestly do not care if you are offended. In fact, nobody does. Welcome to the real world, baby.

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Last Updated 2004-12-26 at 22:40 GMT
Copyright © Van Goodwin, 1998-2004
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