About the Page

I always had the feeling that there are not so many good pages about Halle available on the net. Of course you have some official pages, news and event pages, and also some portal pages. But I was missing a page showing many nice things about the city in a concentrated manner.

That is the reason why I created this page, to fill in the gap. This page mainly consists of pictures taken by myself. I always try to keep the page up to date by providing new pictures if something has changed. Sometimes I also add completely new pictures, if I have discovered something new worth mentioning.

You may notice that I do not show pictures of problem areas and I also do not discuss such thing in the picture descriptions. Of course Halle also has some problem areas and things not that good. However, I think we already talk too much about bad things, so I like to provide a counter balance by not broaching the issue at all.

Maybe some of you are interested to visit Halle after browsing this page. You are of course very welcome!!!

About the Technology behind

Sometimes people ask about the technology behind this page. The page is based on a SQL database, which is queried by PHP4 scripts. The database contains all texts and information of the categories and about the pictures. Longer texts like this one are moved to external files. The pictures are not uploaded to the database, only a referrer is stored in the database.

Each picture is stored in the original size and scaled dynamically if needed. Unfortunately the scaling algorithm provided by PHP4 is not convenient in all cases. Still I think the quality of the scaled pictures is ok. If you want to access the full-sized picture, you can click on the scaled picture to open it.

The page was first released at the end of 2002. In spring 2005 the page was reworked heavily. Now content, layout, and control is completely separated. By applying XHTML/CSS technology it was possible to halve the size of the delivered page and the maintainability was increased. Furthermore the rendering of the page is now more independent from the used browser. While restructuring this page I used heavily the advices and hints given in the book "Designing with Web Standards" by J. Zeldman. Fortunately this is a book not written for the completely first time dummy and it explains the rational for using XHTML/CSS very well.

In summer 2005 I translated the page to English. The content of the German and English version are almost similar. Only at some points the picture description was changed to reflect the fact that not all common sense can be known by a non German user.

At the end of March 2007 a new design was released. If you do not know the old design, take a look at the screenshot! The new design was created by Matthias Hermsdorf. Many thanks go to him for his great work! I think the page has now a modern look again and I also hope that overall usability was improved.

Another page informs you about the integration of this page with Google Earth and the maps provided.