Leif Klingström and this server, 2005.
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These web pages are based on my own experience of trying to grow exotic plants outdoors in Ängelholm, Skåne, southern Sweden. My original plan was to call these pages "Palms and other exotic plants for Sweden". Unfortunately, this would have been a bit ridiculous since, except the coastal regions in southern Sweden, the major parts of Sweden are far too cold for palms. The hardiest palms and many other exotic plants can on the other hand grow in many parts of Denmark and southwestern Norway. In addition, I live close to Denmark and often visit Copenhagen and Zealand. Consequently, it seemed more natural to call these pages "Palms and other exotic plants for Scandinavia". Most of the species that are mentioned are already growing in some places in Scandinavia.
Even if the areas in Sweden where these plants may grow are very limited geographically, are they at least densely populated, which means that there are in reality quite many people even in Sweden that can grow these plants. And seriously, who wants to live in areas where no palms can grow outdoors?
People in the rest of Sweden may anyhow still be able to enjoy these pages. It is for example possible to grow some species of cactus, Yucca and bamboo quite far north in Sweden.
I have no botanical or horticultural education at all. I have a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and I work with design of integrated circuits for wireless communications. Ornamental plants are just a hobby for me.
Some history about these web pages:
The very first version of these web pages existed already in 1998 at torget.se but since they had too limited disk space for each user, I moved the web pages to passagen.se in 1999. Unfortunately, passagen.se started to use irritating pop-up windows with advertising and also a promoting banner on top of the pages that was impossible to remove with Javascript. I gradually felt that I no longer had control over how my web pages were presented to the readers. At the same time, I already had a good broadband internet connection at home and I had also learnt a few things about firewalls and file servers on Linux computers. Consequently, it was quite natural for me to set up my own web server.
This web server (Apache) is running on an isolated virtual Linux computer inside a real physical Linux computer, which I use as a firewall and private file server. This gives good safety (for me) and in addition, it will be easier to make a back-up of the web server. A private web server gives me the opportunity to use CGI scripts and SSI (Server Side Includes) and I have, among other things, used this to set up my own Discussion Forum. The web pages have also been reviewed and updated in connection to the move to my own server. I have also made an effort to make the web pages look as similar as possible on different web browsers. I don't guarantee that I will update the web pages regularly, but it will at least be easier to do it from now on. This also gives me the possibility to collect some settings from the different pages into common files, which often makes it enough to change just in one file instead of all web pages. I hope that I will be able to provide high accessibility of the server and will do my best to minimize any service interruptions. In addition, I have connected the server to a UPS in order to protect it from power surges and to be able to handle power failures in a controlled way.
I will not let other people put their web pages or photo galleries on my server.
I would appreciate some feedback from people with Macintosh computers. How do these web pages look like in the most popular web browsers for Macintosh? Unfortunately, the various web browsers interpret the HTML standard in slightly different ways. Even the fonts can vary a little between different operating systems. Internet is full of badly written web pages that only look reasonable if they are viewed through MS Internet Explorer in Windows. I have made an effort to make the web pages look good in at least the most common web browsers in Windows and Linux. However, I have not had the opportunity to test the web pages from a Macintosh.
Leif Klingström Dec 25, 1999 - updated Jul 2, 2008
Leif Klingström and this server, 2005.
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