About Robyn's Flying Start

Why I Do This

I started the website involuntarily. Someone created a link to a page and said "there, that's your webpage." I put about six links on it and left it for a year.

Then I became a starving flight instructor and thought I might find a few students who searched for flight schools on the web. I created a couple of pages and ate a lot of Kraft Dinner. I don't think it worked, but I got a different flying job and didn't do any flight instruction for a while.

Then I became a flight instructor again, but this time a busy flight instructor. I realized that instead of sitting down with each of my students and explaining all the PSTAR questions, I could do it once, so I did. The rest of the site followed as a context for the PSTAR.

I derive no financial or professional benefit from the site, but it is part of my personal mission statement to share my knowledge with others, so I maintain the site and occasionally expand it according to your feedback and my inspiration.

Tools/Browsers

The original Robyn's Flying Start was the result of violent arguments between Mozilla Composer and the Internet Explorer browser, moderated by Microsoft Notepad (yes, the text editor that is included in any Windows installation). The PSTAR question pages were created by saving MS Word documents as HTML and then deleting huge chunks of the code in Notepad until the pages were viewable on both Netscape and Explorer. Mozilla/Netscape does not fully support style sheets, so if you want to see links change colour when you mouse over them, you'll have to use Internet Explorer. Occasionally pictures overlap each other or cover some text in IE. As far as I can tell from the standards, this shouldn't happen. Resize the browser window and the pictures and text should move apart.

Most of the pictures were created in MS Paintbrush, with occasional use of MS Photo Editor for its rotate tool. Some of the photographs are taken with cheap cameras and scanned with a CanonScan FB620U.

Until 2010 everything was hosted on a home machine with residential internet service. In July 2010 the computer acting as the home internet server died a grisly death and the site remained in limbo for a couple of months until the files were copied to a commercial hosting service in September. That's what I'm about to do now, so if you can read this, it worked.

Credits

Kudos to Auzsha, who took one look at my previous effort and extremely politely made three suggestions. I would tell you what she said that made such a difference, but she is a professional web designer, so her advice is not mine to give away.

I feel obliged to admit that I stole the background technique from Dauntless Software, because I liked it a lot. I did not steal the exact code nor the background gif, just examined the pages very closely to learn how it was done.

Some of the photographs were taken by Danny Fyne, and they are used with his permission.

Alex G. generously allowed me to use his airplane photographs, and even took some more by request.

And thanks to my husband Wade for buying me the computer, and for tech support help.

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This page written 18 October 2002 by Robyn Stewart. Last updated 21 September 2010.