News Desk

Heyas, me again....

Just writing to say I have actually uploaded those pages I was talking about below :) Oh and I want to put in a plug for the wonderful textures I have used to construct elements of this page. They come from the very excellent 'Brain Soup' collection which can be found here. Also, just in case you didn't know, because of those wonderful people at Monolith you can now access the oystafarm at http://oysta.home.ml.org.

Late July

Hey guys.. Yes I am lazy. I will say it now. Honestly though, I just haven't had the time.... What the hell am i talking about ?? Hmm.. Oh yes. This page. I haven't really done anything with it for ages. So I have decided to totally overhaul it. However I am not finished yet. At the moment I have updated everything but there is still all the bells and whistles to add so to speak. Am I raving ? Well yes probably. Time to slow down methinks...

As you can probably see I have been busy working on this site lately, planning new content, getting the hedge clippers out to the AmIRC scripts section which will feature a BitchX scripts section shortly as that is probably the only decent IRC client on other platforms, excepting XiRCON maybe. I have added an image gallery that probably only my friends will appreciate but others a quite welcome on in for a squiz. Plus be on the look out for handy oysta tips throughout the site... they may save your life one day... erm, maybe not but you never know..

What else has the Oysta been up to lately besideds being an IRC addict and setting up HTML ? Well busy at university naturally studying all that interesting Computer Science ( Haven't actually touched a computer yet :) ). Plus checking out some really cool bands such as Grinspoon, Nancy Vandal, Frontend Loader, Frenzal Rhomb and will be seeing Regurgitator, Tism and the Fauves in a couple of days time.

I have a few more plans for this page which I will try to implement shortly. You may have noticed that the OystaFarm is now probably taking a long time to load on slow connections and is probably not much better on faster connections. The reason for this ? Well there are a few of these.. For one thing HTML is not the best thing for trying to format everything perfectly without the use of very long and tedious statements everywhere, thus bloating the size of the actual text involved.. So I am looking at trying to use Cascading Style Sheets to try and do it a bit better... However I am a bit hesitant to do this because....... uh oh....

ITS THE OYSTA RANT AND RAVE SECTION!!!!

WHAT THE HELL IS IT WITH PC BROWSERS!! Geesus they shit me... Why can't Micro$oft and Netscape at least TRY to stick to the standards, I mean thats what they are there for... But no... We have got to have 2 browsers that are extremely divergent , especially in the case of CSS, and a page that may look allright for one person may look like total shit for another.. This is not how the WWW was meant to be. Having to put shit like looks best on MicroSloth Internet Deplorer or Nutscrape $%^# on your page is really naff but you have to do it sometimes because it is the truth because people will surf on in and say "#$%^, this looks like dogs bollox!", and they are probably right simply because the person who designed the site probably got fed up trying to get the page to look OK on all browsers and just stuck to one..

Another lame-arse thing is the support for the Portable Network Graphics format.. I really want to have my page GIF free using all JPEG's and PNG's but alas I can't because for some shit reason none of the major browsers support transparent PNG's properly (excepting Amiga browsers naturally) , as in they don't display transparently. Come on you haxors, PNG's were designed as a superior replacement for GIF's and as a FREE replacement and they are both of these.. Some people wonder why the uptake of PNG's has been so slow, well I think the answer is bloody obvious.

END RANT