Simply, I wanted to experiment on my own without the constraints of a business website. I wanted to be able to make mistakes and take chances without it reflecting on an entire organization or institution. Some of these pages are compilations that I did for work, professional or personal reasons. Sometimes I've had people ask me a question, and it was a lot easier to give them a URL than respond in an e-mail message.
Why? Well, here are some detailed reasons behind some projects I worked upon in my personal website. A number of pages were actually How-To's and What-If's. For example:
There's a lot written about ranking by search engines... how much was true? I wondered how to get some pages more highly ranked in certain search engines without loosing the current ranking. Ranking usually refers to how high a relevance some engines give you. Howevever, I found that cross-engine search programs like MetaFind would ignore the rankings of those engines and make its own, usually alphabetically. (Interestingly, Dogpile, which doesn't do its own sort, caused no such problems.)
Example: The "My Work" page was once named with an abbreviation (my initials and an organization acronym) but upon renaming the page itself to part of the business name, it ranked higher on certain engines. [Visit Search notes, or see more on Meta Tags, below]
Meta tags provide cataloging or classification information "about" a web page -- you usually never see them. They help some search engines like Excite, but not all. I was also interested in generating them, accuracy and possibly for use on my own site indexing and maintenance. (Unfortunately I discovered that at least one widely available software package to index local websites can't handle Meta tags: EWS 1.0 Excite for Web Servers. The results are horrific sometimes.) If you create a local search engine, see how it handles your HTML and Meta tags! [Visit Meta tag links or look over Library Meta Tags/DublinCore]
Organizing, presenting and cataloging images is a really big problem. How to do for oneself vs. an institution? [See Notes on Imaging, especially Phil Greenspun's notes]. I dabbled a bit with some of the problems in my Cat page, described below. [See Cat page and some of the travel pages (which need to be repaired).]
Growth is very difficult if one has only to rely upon oneself. Better to get people to contribute their own knowledge and expertise. So the key becomes collaboration -- collaboration that is automated, while not totally unmediated. The theory behind collaboration on the web is dumped into the "people" section of Databases, but some playful (if crude and unautomated) attempts to do this may be found in the Cat pages.
Site maintenance. An ideal site has re-usable components, easily replaceable, and the main source of information is a rich format that is "dumbed-down" to HTML. Ideally a database, but I haven't found an ideal and easy-to-use solution. If I had tons of time, I would run a Unix box with SQL. [See Databases]
In a modest way, I'm doing genealogy in a database that generates (pretty messy) HTML which I then edit and upload. My Descendants of John Romaine or Ancestors of Leslie Romaine is generated from TMG The Master Genealogist (based on a Foxpro engine); a few individual narratives are or will be generated from TMG and edited down. I'm trying to create regular formats within TMG's report writers, but it's proving a bit difficult.
CSS Cascading Style Sheets. I'm working on CSS, particularly on this site. I want to make the mistakes here, not at work. Some of it's fun and some ugly! I'm finding that older browsers don't look too pretty, but keep readable pages. I've also been investigating accessibility for disabled persons and people using older software. Unfortunately I haven't implemented CSS (or accessibility) consistently or professionally here or in other sites that I manage.
Originally I was mostly interested in SGML as a way to preserve textual information without having to constantly upgrade wordprocessors. The Text Encoding Initiative seems to go through doldums then activity. It seems to be moving into activity now. [See SGML and TEI]
Enhanced Archival Description came along in 1997, and I needed to keep notes and links to sites. My EAD pages became for a while something of an online diary to my responses to its development. (Not all positive.) [Visit EAD.]
This page started as a joke in 1997 in response to my sister who wanted to know what I had done with my cat pictures. I had some rhetorical (see the headlines on the homepage) and parodic reasons (see the Names for Meow page). I also wanted to test some ideas about presenting images on the Web, namely:
- downloading images quickly without interfering with text download and making the page seem "slow"
- Scanning photographs vs. scanning negatives vs. PhotoCD. (PCD is easiest; negatives are a pain; scanned photographs are less a pain but look flat). [See "People" links in Imaging]
- Positioning (This was difficult and each page uses a different style. If I did it over again, I'd use all tables and figure a way to get some variety. Tables can slow the loading of some versions of Netscape, so I was trying to avoid at first.)
- Noting image sizes. Limited success and a pain to maintain.
- Presenting a gallery of all images. (I used Thumbsplus and found this easy to use.) [See Credits]
- Comments and Collaboration. (This is spoofed in the section "Names" [see comments page], but I was wondering how this might work. Proved useful for thinking about models of Web collaboration.)
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