I've been developing for the web since 1994, and in that time I've seen technologies come and go. Some have been truly bad ideas from the start (like the blink tag). Others filled a genuine need (like Flash). Back in the mid-nineties, I dabbled a lot with Macromedia Director. I spent countless hours building a thing I called the ColourZoomer, which loaded an image and then let you interactively change the colours, zoom and crop it. I learned a lot about OO programming doing that. I also built an application called "The Alchemist", which was like a ColourZoomer on steroids. It let you load images...

Welcome to the new Alchemy site. The last version of this site was designed in 1997, so this new one is a total reset - 15 years in the making. When this site started in 1995, if you wanted an image gallery you built it yourself. So I did. Now, there are nice ones that you can have for free and that look much nicer than what I was able to build back then. Back in 1995, I decided to run this site as a communal gallery so I built the capability to allow other people to upload their own artwork for display. At the time this was a novel idea (I was doing it before DeviantArt came along, and all the others...