About balthisar.com

What is balthisar.com?

balthisar.com is a small project dedicated to sharing software, knowledge, and applications. Since its inception in 1997 by Jim Derry, balthisar.com has helped thousands of Windows and Macintosh users get things done.

We pride ourselves on identifying problems, and developing solutions that even we are willing to use (and all of us at balthisar.com have exacting standards).

Where is balthisar.com?

As a dot-com, balthisar.com is global, and due to the nature of paying jobs, the physical base location seems to always be fluid, too. However we will always claim that home is in Southeast Michigan, in Plymouth Township.

Back in the old days when Detroit was a large, rich, and powerful city, it used to be popular to claim to be from Detroit. That’s no longer preferred, and so we’re happy to say that we’re a Southeast Michigan company.

What about some balthisar.com history?

balthisar.com was started in 1996 as “Balthisar Software” with the desire to release the greatest Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) editor in the world. This initial offering, WebWarrior Cascade (now obsolete), allowed early web programmers to implement stylesheets sitewide with a minimum amount of effort. No sooner had the product been released, however, the working draft of CSS2 was released. Hence was born the current incarnation of Balthisar Cascade.

Although Balthisar Software started life with great products, web hosting solutions in those dark days were limited and quite expensive. For a while, Balthisar Software even lived in GeoCities. Eventually domain names became a competitive business (i.e., they became cheap) and some webhosts offered the novel concept of a domain name redirect, that is, you could display your website through a frame on their server using your own domain name. With these new opportunities, balthisar.com launched in September 1997.

As web hosting decreased in price, it finally made financial and aesthetic sense to leave free web hosts entirely, and in 1999 balthisar.com moved to a real hosting service. Have a look at our 1999 relaunch using the archive.org Wayback Machine.

Are you Balthisar Software or balthisar.com?

Our registered dba in Macomb County, Michigan has us listed as Balthisar Software. As balthisar.com isn’t simply a software concern, we’ve re-branded ourselves as the much simpler “balthisar.com” in order to de-emphasize our previous focus on software.

Thanks!

We’re using some pretty high quality images these days at balthisar.com. Fortunately for the kinds of use that small projects like ours requires, there’s lots of free, high-quality stuff out there ripe for the taking. One such project is PSDGraphics and balthisar.com uses some of their images heavily. (Note: we’ve paid for several commercial licenses, which are very low cost and quite reasonable.)

Another good resource we’ve taken advantage of is PSDCovers. Most (but not all) of the product boxes, containers, and so on were built using their actions.

This site consists nearly entirely of static HTML, however it’s produced very much like a dynamic website. Our tool of choice for this is Middleman, which describes itself as “Middleman is a static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development.”

Terms of Use

The contents of this domain have been made available to the public via the the internet. Except where otherwise stated, nearly everything on this website is held under copyright in the United States and worldwide by Jim Derry and balthisar.com. Normal copyright laws apply. Items that we don’t own are either licensed to use or belong to other people.

This domain is hosted on a shared host that is available to the public via the internet. It takes money and resources to run. You agree not to be a jerk by subverting the normal operation of this website and the machine that it’s run on. It’s a website; treat it like one and access it like a normal person.