Richard Flynn :: no comment

Note that this article is about the previous version of this website: since the publication of the article this site has been through another redesign, and another transfer of content-management software. I’m keeping this article here for the sake of completeness.

Announcing version 2.0 of richardflynn.net! If you tried visiting the site in the last week or so and were greeted with the rather austere (and buggy) ‘site down’ message, I apologize. As you see, the site is now back up with all of the same content as existed before.

The first thing the returning visitor will notice is the new design. I think this design is cleaner and easier to read than the blues and greens I had before, and this design now stretches to fill the width of your browser window (it is a

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There was a time when the tech-related question I was being continually asked was about the different options there are when it comes to email services. Several years later, I’ve now decided to write this article so that the next time someone asks me the same question, I can say, ‘look at my website!’ So, what follows is a beginner’s guide to the different types of email service available and my efforts at explaining the pros and cons of each of the four major technologies—Web-based email, POP3, IMAP, and email managed by a Microsoft Exchange server.

1. Web-based email

This is often people’s first foray into the wild world of email: for many people, the word “Hotmail”—possibly the most popular Web-based email service, bought many years ago by

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My first foray into Web design was for my sister Helen’s site which went live in the summer months of 1999. I’d taught myself HTML from a book called HTML Goodies, by Joe Burns. The first design was frames-based, with a navigation frame on the left-hand side of the browser window which drove the content pages on the right-hand side. The first site had I think ten pages or so, and had a cream background which we now refer to as “vomit” coloured.

Even back then I saw the benefits of using CSS to control the layout of the page, though I was only using style sheets really to define the fonts, and even then I got caught up with a mixture of relative and absolute font-sizing that looked different on every browser and OS combination I tried.

Gradually I moved away

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