About This Web Site

When anything is done, usually it means something. Most home pages on the Net are nothing more than a desire to show off, express oneself, and mine, of course, is no exception whatsoever. Yet my web site has other aims in addition to those.

History

I did not express a desire to set up my site but I was caught by an advertisement: “Build your site in 60 seconds!” or something. I thought, “Why not?” and registered the URL of stirlitz.narod.ru. It was in July, 2000.

lot of time elapsed, however, before anything appeared there. Everything was in Russian. That's the way my site looked before 2002

I did not make any efforts to promote my site and as a result the number of hosts did not exceed one per day for almost a year. Since May, 2001 when enough people learned about my site, they started to visit it oftener—two hosts a day, in July three, in August four. And in September, 2001 I finally registered my site in the principal Russian search engines and catalogs, which gave me ten hosts a day that month and 25 during the two following months. Since the New Year of 2002, after I completely changed the design of the site that you can see now (and you can see the old one on the left), the flow of visitors is constantly growing: 32 hosts a day in January, 50 in February, 73 in March, over 100 in April.

On the first of April I completed the great overhaul of my site and decided that it was high time to translate it into English.

Aim

I consider my site to be my handbook on the Internet and computers which can be accessed from anywhere. But I think that many people will find the information gathered here useful, so it makes sense to keep it in the Internet. Especially when I am asked to give some links (for instance, to language software), I do not have to delve into my Favorites, read Help→about—all I have to do is to give my address (URL). Or someone wants to read my articles, but I ran out of magazine copies long ago.

One of the first sections in my web site was dedicated to the Internet connection services in Odessa. This point is very important for me like for many people; I always follow the news, discuss the shortcomings and good points of ISP's with everyone who has access to the Internet, follow the prices narrowly. I have more than once been asked to advise who is the best ISP. When the section was there, all I had to do was give the link to my web site or print out for those who are just about to get connected.

My site helps me to meet new friends, to strike up acquaintances, to get new contacts and orders.

Design

I did all of my pages by myself from the scratch in Notepad. At the same time I studied the HTML. Previously I had no idea what it was. I am not sure that everyone is fascinated with the results but I do not care — so far. However, I have already thought about ordering a design with an experienced designer but put it off so far. For the time being my site does not make so much profit and it makes no sense to spend money on it. It is enough to spend a lot of my time. I was aware, though, that my site looked horrible, took other people advice and ideas into account and what you can see now is the result of my reconstruction efforts. Now all of my pages have a common style. I had to use JavaScript in order

that the contents of the site were available from any page,
to cut the average size of a page by 8Kbyte,
not to have to edit each page of the site when the contents change

Navigation

I did my best to mind all the remarks about the navigation that I had gotten from my visitors and also everything that was written in subscriptions and textbooks dedicated to the HTML. I hope that I have been able to make your stay here easy and troublefree. The navigation consists of two parts:

The Main Menu on the top of the screen. It contains everything that I have in my site. It is convenient for an “absolute” transition to a certain section. There is also a search form which searches the pages of my web site that contain your keywords. There is also a fast forward button there called Next — this is useful when the page does not seem interesting and you want to turn it; the Home button for returning to the start page and the Contact button for calling the feedback page (e-mail address, guestbook, etc.)
Two floating toolbars at each side of a page (it only appears in MSIE 4+ and Opera 7+). All of the sections of the web site are there (on the left) and two buttons for fast scrolling to the top and bottom of the current page (the first and last buttons respectively); also the Add to Favorites button and the Feedback button. And the contents of the current section are on the right as well as the buttons for the previous and next page
The Tool Bar at the bottom of each page. It is a so-called relative navigation, because, whereas the Main Menu is the same for each page (it is in the file menu.js, which loads on your computer at the beginning and is supposed to stay in temporary files till the end of the visit), the lower menu is unique for each page. Here is its description (which is also available as tooltips when the mouse is over a button):
Text menu at the bottom of each page. It contains all the section of the web site and also scroll links to jump to the next/previous/first/last page in the section, or to the previous/next section.

When using the lower menu please keep in mind that the section order is the same as in the main menu. So, if you start browsing in order from the home page, first you get to the Articles section. When you press the Next Section link in a page in that section, you will get to Dating, etc.

I hope that it is simple and easy to use. So, if it is the first time you have come here, please start with, Articles and read on in order; if a section is not interesting for you, skip it by pressing the Next Section link at the bottom. If you my regular visitor, you will find the main top menu more useful. You can quickly get to any page in the site using it. Or you can use the web site search. By pressing the Find button you will get the list of the pages in the web site that contain your keywords.

Site Map

My web site is relatively large. Therefore a newcomer may get lost here and fail to find what he or she is looking for. So it is recommended that you start here, first getting familiar with the table of contents that is the full web site map with descriptions for each section and page.

My Articles

I made this section to put my offline articles there. Unfortunately, all of them are in Russian. I translated one into English.

English By Radio is my article published in 1998. You can use it too if you replace English with Russian

International Dating

This section is dedicated to international dating. As a translator, I often have to work with men who are pursuing Russian women and I have accumulated some experience in this field that I can share.

Problems and Dangers
Direct Manual which can help you save time and money
Offer to men looking for a wife in the FSU
Links to dating resources

Languages

This section is quite long in the Russian part of the site, but obviously it makes no sense to teach natives their language, so it is short here.

Esperanto the International Language
Russian (currently under construction)
Online dictionaries (about 100). This page contains links to some online dictionaries as well as search forms where posssible. There are slang dictionaries, thesauri and regional languages (for example, an American may find it useful to read lists of British expressions before visting the UK)
Links to language resources (currently under construction)

Stirlitz

When the web site originated in Russian, it was called Stirlitz. So it could not do without this section, even though it was not dedicated to Stirlitz alone.

Who Stirlitz is — an introduction for the curious
The way hedgehogs breed — the first chapter of a popular parody novel about Stirlitz
Jokes about Stirlitz, very popular in Russia
Links to resources that are related to Stirlitz in one way or another

Radio

What I know about international short-wave broadcasting.

Frequencies of main stations
Broadcast grid that is a schedule of some stations all in one table
List of stations including links to their web sites

Electronic Mail

Descriptions of some free mail servers
Black list of bad servers (currently under construction)
Setting up mail clients (Outlook Express)
Spam, also known as unsolicited advertising or bulk mail, that is all the shit that you have to get our of your mailbox every day. But you do not really have to. Read the recipies, follow them and forget about spam like I did
Domains (.net, .com and others), matching countries and vice versa; there is also a link to the country page
Free mail servers list without descriptions

Metasearch the Net

Hundreds of search engines. You can search all of them simultaneously if you like.

Software Review

There are a number of programs that I like very much and cannot do without. It takes quite long to browse through large software archives looking for something you want. But here is a selection of some best programs. Most of them are free.

Text — editors, clipboard extensions, etc.
Files — managers, shell extensions, mass renamers, etc.
Calculators both simple and complex, units and currency converters
Archivers
Net & E-mail — browsers, download managers, searchers, dialers, e-mail clients and checkers (currently under translation)
System — tuning up Windows, cleaning registry, etc. (currently under translation)
Graphics — editors, viewers (currently under translation)
English — dictionaries, hammers, examiners (currently under translation)
Miscellany — useful small applications (currently under translation)
Links to file archives, search engines, etc (currently under translation)
Hot keys of Windows and applications (currently under translation)

Windows tuning

Some advice how to optimize your PC (currently under translation).

Odessa

A few words about my home town.

About Me

Well. If you are here it means that I was able to interest you and you do need this section…

Autobiography
My Work & Services
Resume
My Customers
My Photos
About the Web Site — this where you are reading now
Olds — old news
Contact — ways to get in touch with me

Links

Some links that I would suggest visiting (currently under translation).

Technical Information

The number of English pages: 59 (average English page length is 20KB). Number of sections: 10. Size: 40МБ (total; including Russian pages and files to download).

Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

http://www.igorkalinin.com/.

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