About and Contact

jump to comments

Behind the Site

This site was born out of my love for rainbows, color, and light, plus my desire to understand how they work. It's a way for me to make and organize my notes, while also aiming to educate other people who are interested. It's also to collect related information in one place and preserve it. As such, it's a passion project made by an amateur, so there may be typos and some information may not be 100% accurate.

I'm just one person putting this site together with HTML, CSS, and a little JS. I'm not a brand, company, or any kind of organization, just somone who likes rainbows and colors a whole lot. This site costs hardly anything to maintain, so I have no need to display ads or sell merch, nor do I sell your data. I just want to collect information about rainbows and color into a central place for easy reference. These topics may be a special interest of mine.

My name is Simon and I make dentures for a living! That funds the very minimal cost of this site (domain name and Neocities supporter account), and I enjoy it so I am not looking to make webdev a career, just a hobby. If you'd like to know more about me, I have a personal site for fooling around: Solaria's Webspace! This site was orginally a part of that one, but it turned into its own full fledged project worthy of its own domain and better everything file organization.

Disclaimers

While I have an associates in Chemistry, I do not have a strong physics background, which is behind a lot of the phenomenon described on these pages. I can't guarentee the accuracy of the information on this site, but as I research and my understanding improves, I go back and edit my pages with more accurate explanations.

Basic Physics/Chemistry 101 concepts may not be cited, but more niche or complex ideas will be cited in text. Please visit these links, they hold valuable and fascinating information! My conclusions drawn from research are not cited since they are from myself (said reasearch will be cited beforehand). Pure speculation is indicated by smaller greyer text.

These pages use JavaScript for the sidebar links (use the sitemap section on the homepage to navigate if you have JS disabled). JS is also used for the light/dark mode buttons, by default this site is in lightmode. If you click either button your browser will store two words ('theme' and 'light'/'dark') to remember which mode you selected, so that it will be the same when you return. No other information is stored.

Notes about Word Usage

I try to make the more scientific concepts covered by this site easy to understand for everyone, only using technical terms when I need to, but readers may still need a highschool physics and chemistry education. This site assumes the reader knows what atoms and molecules are.

How this site uses the word "color"

You may have off handedly refered to black as a color, only to get some obnoxious response like, "Black isn't a color!". Sure, black isn't a hue, but what other category is commonly used to describe an object being red, blue, pink, black, white, brown, grey, etc? We call those colors. This site may specify which colors are part of the visible spectrum, but it will not declare any color not a "real" color.

How this site uses the word "rainbow"

Technically a rainbow refers only to the colorful bow that forms in the sky during a sunny rain. However, much like everyone else, I refer to any dispersion of white light into its colored wavelengths as a rainbow. Context should make it clear in which manner "rainbow" is being used.

Design

I'm no graphic/web designer, but I do enjoy working with CSS to design this site. My aim is to make it easy to read, yet retain personality and charm. I can't fathom making a site about rainbows without including rainbows in the design, but being an information dense site, I of course wanted the text to be a simple font on a neutral background, relegating my rainbows to decorative lines, far background, and links upon hover.

In interest of legibility, I have made the lightmode a light grey rather than white which, while it may make this site look "dated", is also much easier on the eyes. I kept the links blue and underlined, so it is obvious what they are (though I have customized the blue to match the site palette). Expandable sections are also underlined to hint at their interactivity.

A particularly challenging, yet important part of the CSS, is the design for inline citations. It was important for me to figure out a way to indicate exactly which part of text is being cited. Is it the whole paragraph, just the last sentance, the last clause? What if different parts of the same sentance have different sources? To visually designate this there are purple borders on the sides of the cited text, and said text will lightly highlight when hovered over or tapped.