Voltage divider resistor values

[duck_arse]

a modern website needs only to have huge globs of useless (as far as providing content, actual information) scripts, to slow down the loading of the page, rollover some ads for scarlett j, break good browsers, and drive away troglodykes like me.

googoo provides a perfect template, more junk in their <style> statement on every page returned than links to other sites. and still it's quicker to search googoo for pages here than to use the local search.

[R.G.]

I think more people would read GEOFEX if the website were to be updated. In an ideal world nobody would care about the aesthetics of the website if the content was good, but we don't live in an ideal world. Aesthetics have a HUGE impact on any website's effectiveness.
...
There are many other aspects of your website which require rethinking, but there's too many to list in one post. In short, your website, while excellent on the content side of things, needs some work done to it to make it more reader friendly. Once again, if it takes too much effort from the reader, they'll just go somewhere else.

It is true - my baby IS ugly. 

I really ought to take time away from the list of technical endeavors to make it pretty.

I'll put that into the list.

[tubegeek]

RG, as a long-time reader of GEOFEX, and the dismaying lack of ScarJo photos notwithstanding, I think that there are two issues that I would want to put my two cents into. These are only my opinions and please give them only their due weight.

In terms of graphic design, I think that is very much a secondary consideration when it comes to a technical-info site such as yours. Do whatever works for you in that area and don't give it much time or attention.

In terms of organization, I think that the frames-plus-pdf layout structure is not helping you get your information across. I know I am always somewhat happier looking at the pdf's when I land on them from a Google search than I am from within the frame structure: it's easier to be able to use the whole browser window - at least for me.

Also with respect to organization, I think that there is a fair amount of info that is not accessed by any of the pages that mean to act as sub-indexes. I'm guessing that your plan has been to make these more recent additions accessible from the first page's "New" scroll, and to limit the amount of updating work that you have to do on the sub-index pages. But the result has been that the sub-indexes are very out of date and incomplete. And I'm not sure what the intention is behind keeping the visible URL static instead of reflecting the content that is in the browser at that moment - maybe that serves a purpose, or did at one time for you.

Look, I get that updates require nonexistent free time. If there's anything I can do to help, please PM or email me and I'll do what I can in my (nonexistent) free time - code testing/editing, proofreading, whatever. I'm at least familiar with the content, that can't be totally useless.

GEOFEX is a treasure, perhaps the best site of its kind, and we all can benefit from any improvements that are made to it. I'm definitely willing to have some sweat equity in that.

Finally, as always, and again, thank you for the advice, and information, and inspiration. I'm looking back at over 20 years now of a teacher-student relationship (CompuServe BBS days and beyond!) That's just amazing to me and I'm very grateful.

[Thecomedian]

Learning is procedural. You need to know what you need to know to go on to the next step, and you might not know exactly what that "need to know stepping stone" is. I've gone hunting around Geofex more than a few times, and I don't think I've ever landed on that resistor divider page before.

People don't want to waste time, and that is understandable. If you could get exactly what you need to know by asking rather than fruitless and sometimes frustrating hunting around, that's much better for your own learning progress. There's nothing wrong with that. I feel like it'd be as if you were to ask a teacher a question in a classroom, and their answer would be "go to the library and figure it out yourself".

so, I just went to geofex and subtracted the resist.htm part of the link to go to directory geofex/circuits and got

Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.

variations of circuits.htm or circuits.com, etc etc etc, render 404's. There seems to be no upper directory which will take you there.

Here's an example of all the pages I've been to at Geofex.

http://www.geofex.com/Article_Folders/ffselect.htm
http://www.geofex.com/bookpages/bookblurb.htm
http://www.geofex.com/Article_Folders/box_pop.htm
http://www.geofex.com/Article_Folders/wahpedl/wahped.htm#inductor
http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/impednc.htm
http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/protostyles/proto_styles.htm
http://www.geofex.com/effxfaq/bldfx.htm

Now, a number of these pages contain "hieroglyphics", that is, information that was as yet unintelligible to me because I haven't seen the preceding required information to understanding what was being discussed. That's not a fault of the site, but these are the few pages I discovered, usually from googling a subject. It's really difficult trying to find and navigate to these pages from the Top page of Geofex.

The top navigation bar on the left side has a thing called "electronics". It actually contains "electronic theory, analog design" and other things that are useful, yet it wasn't apparent to me before that such things would exist in that generic and unexplaining heading.

FX projects and Schematics and more have many overlaps, bloating both pages. If they were further subcategorized into unique pages for each heading and then shared pages for each heading, finding stuff you haven't seen before would be easier than physically parsing the whole pages and going through redundant values by eye.

Regarding the electronics heading, every time I hit a button to open analog design or theory or whatever else, I get a blank gray page with nothing.

I think that I, like most other people, recognize the value of time, that every single moment of life is worth more than gold and as such shouldn't be wasting, and running around in circles and finding dead ends isn't productive or intellectually satisfying. In an information age where we CAN get what we want as quickly as possible to waste as little time as possible, why would we choose to stumble around blindly? Why would we demand that others do so just because we had done so? Why would we be resentful of people seeking the most "bang for their buck"?

It doesn't matter if it seems like a waste of time to help someone, because if you're trying to teach others you're usually developing not only better teaching skill, but recompiling your own learned information into a stronger foundation for yourself. No attempt to teach others is wasted.

There's also the "search the forum first" bit. But then "necroposting" hate is at odds with this, since the forum eventually becomes bloated with post after post of the same stuff, since people can't bump so-called "dead" topics, even if they remain as relevant to newcomers today as they were years ago. Additionally, a forum is for discussion and eventually wouldn't the forum have "enough information" that you could simply close it to further discussion and turn it into a search engine, since all possible questions newbies would have will have been asked before by years worth of users prior? What's the point of Q&A on a "full" forum, then? What's the point of a forum if the answer will be "oh go google that" or "go read this webpage"?

Anyway, done with the rambling for now.

[R.G.]

I'm on my fourteenth or fifteenth year of newbies, just on the web. It's pretty familiar.

People progress from being amazed at all they can get so easily to being frustrated that everything isn't available instantly. That seems to be happening faster. 

And I have to admit - I have dug out scraps of information in any form whatsoever for so long, I'm almost immune to whether the info looks pretty and smells nice.    It's a failing of mine. I work on it a lot when I'm alone.

I'm well aware of both the oldies' tendency to say how they had to walk to school, in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways. And of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, which can be reduced somewhat to yes, man does live by bread alone, if bread is scarce.

That being said, yes, I know the baby is ugly. I'm not unaware of good web design, I'm just almost immune to it. So, thanks for the advice. I'll put it into the list.