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.

It is part of my personal mission statement to share my knowledge with others, so I will continue to expand the site according to your feedback and my inspiration.

Tools/Browsers

Robyn's Flying Start is 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.

If you're my student, and your computer-web browser combination doesn't allow you to view these pages, let me know and I'll fix it for you.

I'm using linbot as a link checking tool. It seems to work, but the Transport Canada server rejects its advances. I think that most of Transport Canada's site is set to reject robots.

Also this is hosted on a home machine with residential internet service, so it may be inaccessible from time to time. Sorry, but that's pretty good considering you didn't pay for access. My personal machine (not the webserver) is a Compaq laptop, so I know the pages are easy to view on a small screen.

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 2 February 2005.