| What exactly IS this site?...
This site is first and foremost intended to be fun. I founded the site
back in the Fall of 1999 as a much-needed outlet for myself and anyone else
who wished to come along for the ride. Whereas with previous sites
I would only find myself updating once a month (if I was lucky), this site
would allow me to post anything I fond neat or interesting, and would be
something I could keep on a fairly regular basis.
What type of content gets posted?
Anything and everything that catches my eye. First and foremost it
is a place for me to post anything I write. Whether it's an article
on sports, a humorous look at something, or a dead-serious article about
an ongoing problem in the world, this is a site that can deal with and express
all of the above. Rants, raves, news, and general old-fashioned nonsense.
That is the heart of this site. There is no small niche or subculture
that is being targeted. This site has no agenda beyond spreading the
word about something cool, funny, or noteworthy.
You know how you click from site to site sometimes, looking for something
interesting... anything interesting to catch your eye? And instead
all you run across are tech articles about BSD, or how to tweak your 3d card,
or something else that while informative, really isn't anything new or
interesting? The goal of this site is cut through all that other overdone
crap and simply give you, the reader, a look at things that may have fallen
through the cracks that a wide variety of people would find interesting.
The site is also a repository for anything I make, create, write, or do.
In fact if you really poke around the site you can access other random
stuff that is uploaded but not posted for various reasons. By popular
demand, I'm going to start posting more of these type of things as opposed
to just the neat litle blurbs that have mostly-comprised the site so far.
In short, this site is my catch-all.
Why this site?
Why not? There are a ton of sites out there that are collections or
repositories of things people write. There's nothing wrong with those.
There are also thousands upon thousands of news sites out there, dealing
with everything from the international to the obscure. It only seems
logical that somewhere on the middle ground between those two, that there's
room for a site like this one.
Why is the site so erratic in terms of updates and postings?
The site is first a foremost an outlet for me as a writer, and sometimes
I just plain get blocked (or blindsided by life). Also my personal
computer system has developed a knack for crashing hardcore and requiring
a complete reformat and rebuild every couple of months. All these things
combine to make updating difficult. And sometimes, there's just nothing
new to say and/or post about. And like anyone else, I ocassionally
need poking and prodding to get back into things when I let it slide ofr
a while.
What's the deal with the Disclaimer?
Argh. I'm not sure. There is a space between the final two lines
of the disclaimer on all the pages that appears for no real reason and I
can't find a way to get rid of it yet. Rest assured that if I ever
do find a way to fix it, you'll be the first to know and hear me rant on
and on about how much I hated it. I've spent weeks trying to track
down an explanation for it and have found none so far. It appears on
both Netscape and IE. Even MP3.com has the same issue if you'll chekc
the bottom of any of their pages.
Where's an "About the Author/Webmaster/Creator" Section?
I get asked this a ton. I don't know if I'll put one of these up or
not. The focus of this site is the content and such, and not really
about me (I'm really qite boring). Wait a couple months and we'll see
how things stand and if it really is appropriate to put one up or not.
How do you create/maintain the site, and what tools do you use?
I take a lot of flak for this, but I don't use Notepad or Wordpad for HTML.
I used to years ago but I don't have time for that anymore. Since
99.99% of this site's content is text, I've found AOLpress (no longer available
for download online) to be my editor of choice. It's small, fast,
efficient, and does what I want and need it to do without being either
overwhelming or underwhelming. Plus, if and when I need to, I can still
open 'er up and manually edit any code I need to fix or tweak.
On the graphics end of things, any images I create or have created are done
in PaintShop Pro. I'm not much of an articts or graphics person but
I can accomplish a lot with PaintShop Pro. I've grown to like PSP quite
a bit, and I almost never have had access to Adobe Photoshop so PSP is a
reasonable alternative choice (and nothing to sneeze at either, to be frank).
For uploads my poison of choice is CuteFTP. That's just out of sheer
force of habit. ;-)
As far as content, I spend a couple hours a day generally either scouring
the online realms for nifty things, or writing something of my own. That's
not really a lot of time to be perfectly honest, since I'm also multitasking
in IRC and email at the same time. But even if the site weren't here
I'd be doing the same things anyways so why not post them. ;-) |
