mommymonster.com

Miscellaneous diversion since 1999.

Thanks for visiting mommymonster.com.

People ask why I'm called "Mommy Monster." That started when Adam was just a little guy and was worried that monsters would come into the house at night while he was sleeping. So I would tell him that I didn't allow monsters in the house because they always tromp around with their big, muddy feet on my clean carpet. "But, how can you keep them out?" he would ask. "Because I'm the Mommy Monster, and I'm bigger and meaner than any of them!" I would reply. And I've been the Mommy Monster ever since. Adam is a lot older now, and very embarrassed when I tell that story (sorry Adam).

Adam and I live with our cats Phoebe, Captain Kidd and Moo Cow in a little house in a little neighborhood on the side of a little mountain next to a big city.

Please sign our guestbook or e-mail us to let us know how you found us!

I keep a domain just because I like to know how stuff works. mommymonster.com is my personal virtual sandbox. It tends to be filled with whatever toys I happen to be playing with at the time, along with miscellaneous other things like vacation pics and my blog.

Credit where credit is due department:

mommymonster.com is powered by Apache / Red Hat Linux servers and uses a MySQL backend. It's hosted by successfulhosting.com. They've been my host since, strangely enough, shortly after 9/11 (my previous host's main backbone was under the World Trade Center). I'd recommend successfulhosting.com to anyone looking for a good, stable host with excellent customer support and features (and they are not asking me to say that!).

mommymonster.com was created using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. It looks best at 1024X768 or above, but its format is fluid: i.e. built to keep its format when resized, even at unusual aspect ratios. It should look OK, or at least be readable, at screen resolutions of 800X600 or above. (Try resizing your browser window and check it out!)

Other than a couple of the game pages (and perhaps some of the photo pages created by Arles), mommymonster.com is HTML 4.01 and CSS compliant.

I've previewed the site with Lynx, Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.7b, Firefox .08, Opera 7.23 and Opera 7.5, and Konquerer. It should be at least basically navigable with any browser, with or without images and javascript. It's best in browsers supporting inline frames with javascript enabled and images on. (Duh!) If the browser is text-based like Lynx, the site map can be used for navigation. If images are off, there's a link to the site-map available. But, to be honest, there's not much worth looking at here without the images. I don't recommend Konquerer for browsing mommymonster.com. Apparently the "few details" that make Konquerer HTML4.0 and CSS2 non-compliant also make it mommymonster non-friendly. I'm not planning to do any tweaking to make Konquerer support better. If you are a Linux user, try Firefox.

A "feature" in Opera causes iframes to always be top-most, regardless of z-index. After a few aborted attempts at fixing this, I resorted to hiding the iFrame while the menus are in use if the browser is Opera. A big thanks to http://www.howtocreate.co.uk for their browser sniffer script that lets me identify Opera even if it is identifying itself as something else. I don't have access to a Mac and so haven't tested any browsers on that platform. If you are using a Mac, write and let me know how it looks and if anything is broken.

The fact that I've done all of this on a non-commercial site that hardly anyone visits probably gives you a clue about how I like to tweak things. This isn't limited to software: My computer, that has been built, rebuilt, and built again on a continuing basis. When I get stressed out, I come home and rebuild my computer.

The leaf menus and the site map were created using DHTML Menu Builder.

The popup box over the mommymonster.com image on the welcome page was built using Eric Bosrup's overLIB.

The weather report page is created using Ham Weather. It defaults to the local area around Portland, Oregon. But feel free to look up your own forecast!

The weather image in the upper left corner of the page will change according to the current weather in the general Portland, Oregon area. To decode the standard, Government-issue weather broadcast METAR data, I used PHP Weather. It can be obtained from SourceForge.net, the world's largest Open Source software development web site. The images are my own and were animated with Jasc Animation Shop and Macromedia Fireworks MX.

Persistent Illusion is driven by WordPress, an open-source, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. (And, I might add, 5-minute installation and nearly painless upgrading, but not necessarily painless formatting.) The newsfeeds are via CaRP. Persistent Illusion used to be part of mommymonster.com, but I recently spun it off to its own domain because its subject matter doesn't really fit in here. Persistent Illusion is "skinnable" but not all of the skins are liquid.

Photo and Art index pages, thumbnails, slide shows and pop-ups were made with Arles Image Webpage Creator.

The moon phase script and the "Fun Stuff" games are freeware javascripts obtained from various sources around the net. Credit to the authors has been left as I received it. The Fortune Cookie "fortunes," image and "lucky number" are mine.

Art images and photos, including site graphics, were created/edited using a variety of software, most often Macromedia Fireworks, Jasc Paintshop Pro and Corel Painter.

Everything on this site unless otherwise noted, including design, artwork and photographs, is © Judy A Becker. Please respect my property. If you would like to use something from mommymonster.com, contact me and we'll see what we can work out.