Diary #1..."The Early Days"

[12:10 am 17-June-97]

Finally got around to re-naming all of the image files. The longer I put it off, the more there were! Also while I was at it, I put Reffering Doc links into each page. Now I will upload the whole site once again. (Thought I'd go ahead and make this entry while I am at it.) Now that I think of it, This would probably be a good time to go ahead and split the diary...It's starting to take a little time to upload, and this could be something of a changing point anyway. Lord knows, I'm now in practice!!!

[1:45 am 16-June-97]

Just moved my whole site to abode.com. Even though I'm still on the tt list, the hit count has slowed substantially so I think the logs may not burst at the seams, or abode have bandwidth problems. Prior to that, I had set up a site feedback form that resided at abode, but through some trickery was accessible from AT&T. Funny, not to many people used it. Mabey because I had to have a warning that it would take people to another site and the tListe applet would disapear. What else...Mom got a scanner but all her carving pics are down at the gallery. I scanned a few of me and Melissa but that's about it for now.

[4:59 pm 07-June-97]

Quite a lot of content has been added over the last several days. Further, some brand new tier documents have been added. I had not anticipated doing this till I filled the ones that existed already. Got some images of Mom's carvings in. Big hit is seems. They cost $5.00 each and the guy sent tiny images of low quality even though I tried to make it understood that I was shooting for things in the 70k to 100k range due to the structure of my site. What else...Put in a spreadsheet and some of Langstons "Comedian's eye veiw" stuff. Also decieded to include a "Refering Document Chain" link on each page so now I have to go back thru every doc and add it.

[11:14 pm 02-June-97]

OK...Not much has changed on the site in the last few days because of my interest in abode.com and dealing with the logs. I made a new page just for logs (in "fun apps" Cause it's so fun) and did the footwork to get it on tListe. Also included a rambling story about it.

[3:25 am 01-June-97]

Wow...Is it really 3:30? I got into dinking around parsing and anylsing the abode logs and forgot all about site work and homework. Picked out some nice pics for Susans page, but Tom was not at the gallery to scan them. Just changed the index page to pull one of the icons from my directory at abode so I should be able to track my AT&T usage that way. WHY didn't I think of that before? They must be real close to making a new top ten list!

[11:15 am 31-May-97]

Did an excel macro for parsing abode logs cause I couldn't figure out how to import them into access. Might be beter to filter in excel anyway...Not sure yet. Some poor shmuck tried 6 different abode (non-)directories before noticing his mistake :-) My god but one could create havoc if he had a twisted mind!!! Putting silly docs (or worse, ones with macro-viruses) in spots that are commonly mis-FTP'd! It's nice for poor typist that the good folks at abode don't have (too much) of a warped sense of humor :-)

[11:25 pm 30-May-97]

Well-lets-see...last night I did all "trunk level" pages, a page for Susan, entries in the credits, and got the few remaining things from the old site. Today I got permission to fool with abode.com. Asked for permission to use the cat animation for the abode index. Put up a quicky index there (with cat...I hope I get permission soon or I'll have to take it down...It looks neat.) Sent letter to John to get feedback on a possible cyberwave problem. I want it for the abode index too, but not before I am sure it won't foul visitors machines. (that would make adobe happy ;-) Downloaded the abode logs and had a peek at them with excel. No real log analyzer yet. After filtering out the dweebs who hammered on the re-load button (like id' have done!) abode seems to have gotten around 430 hits since Sunday night!!! Man is this stuff fun!!!

[3:35 am 29-May-97]

Opened this by mistake so, what the hell, I'll make an entry. Put priority on the newly created "credits" page. Also on getting Jon's pic up since he sent it to me *instead* of getting some sleep. Did a "friends" folder page. Imported the site into excel and organized that mess. Checked tListe from win95/MSIE3.0...worked?!? News/Mail. Now to put some screen shots in the doc I meant to open...

[11:52 pm 27-May-97]

Came back last night, but didn't make any revisions (as far as I remember.) After school, I made tiny little .gifs and updated the tListe script to indicate the level of completion of each document. Also put a nicer background on the applet, reformatted the counter('s) and made a new pic of tListe for the index.html. Asked a few questions on the usenet and took care of mail.

[4:02 pm 26-May-97]

Got up, did mail, corrected a bad link if one enters from the octree house path. Finally got around to putting the real counter up (in addition to AT&T's) The thing went into operation at around 3:32 pm. Now it's off to the country for a day to chill out with the family :-)

[9:34 am 26-May-97]

Got the site going as stated below. It looked so dead that I just had to keep working on it. I pretty much transfered all the stuff from my old site, but being so large, any real content however unfinished, is hard to find! At around 9:00am, I sent kind of a form letter (kind of personalized...did each individually so I didn't have to learn how to do Bcc) to most of my friend and relatives asking them to check my site for big errors. Now I will make one more change or two than get some MUCH needed sleep!

[3:11 am 26-May-97]

I got the tListe applet and figured out how to use it *somewhat*! There was practically nothing written in English so I pretty much had to learn what I could by looking at some examples. By examining some cache captures from his site, I can see that there are many capabilities that I am missing. Anyway, I built a script file (which is LOTS simpler than the TOC's) and got the site going. Uploaded the whole new site(around 1:00am I think), and it seems to work :-) Since I will keep this site up, I made some quicky changes and threw Raymonds link into it's spot. Also put Stefan's link there. I should mention that as soon as I got the site going, I got mail from Stefan and it seems that I fucked up wrt targets. This is why the problems with the TOC!!! Oh well...Live and learn!

[12:28 am 25-May-97]

Went out on the old "net search for a Java app" agian for a TOC replacement. Found a few that may be worth trying. ALL seem to have the problem with NS4.0pr4. Don't know about the size thing till I try. I'm looking at a French guys app that is much simpler...I may give it a try tonight.

[3:55 pm 24-May-97]

I worked 15 hours SOLID yesterday building all of the pages (with links), and the 9k script file. At about 9:30 in the morning, I had it done, but upon testing on my local HD, selections from the TOC would launch multiple browsers under IE3.01 like NS4.0pr4 was doing!!! Running the active web-site on my local did NOT. I fear the worst. Tossed off a quick note to Stefan then crashed. Now, I am putting in a few minimal in the most pressing pages (and doing this entry least I forget) then I will upload the whole new site and cross my fingers!

[5:03 pm 23-May-97]

Pretty good day so far...Last night up till 5am doing the spreadsheets for my site-restructure. Got the skeleton planned and mapped, the core going, and a template for the entries. [Possible employer calls up and we discuss me doing CAD work on my machine at home.] Back to bed, get up and do e-mail. Get not that *I'VE MADE AT&T's TOP 10 PERSONAL WEB PAGES!?! Do a quick entry on the front page to try to give credit where credit is due. Now back to work totally re-due ing the skeleton of this site!

[5:46 am 22-May-97]

Thought I was going to totaly re-vamp the TOC script but...Jon sent me a gift .gif that was so cool I had to put it up. Also decided to put the no-spam thing up and fix the tables with knowlege gained from his site. Up all night, but I really like the new look of the index.html page!!! Still need to spell check the page, but I need to instal Office from NT if I work from here.

[4:30am 21-May-97]

Now trying to work more and more with winNT. This entry is more or less a test of the FTP software and my whole web site maintainence system under NT. Also should add that last night I made a major revision to the start page in taking all java off of it and puting the house applet a seperate page. I was too tired to make an entry here at that time.

[12:15am 19-May-97]

Went ahead and changed the TOC version to 3.1. Also found that the TOC problem when using NS Comm pr4 is that it opens a new browser when an item is selected from the toc. Will send mail to Stefan now.

[7:05pm 18-May-97]

Got some very appreciated feedback concerning spelling and some other problems with the functionality of the TOC and the first page accesibility using a browser with Java turned off. Took the time (finely) to spell-check the three main pages. These being the ones that have no temporary status disclaimer. Also made a few updates to the text to eliminate some of the joke type stuff that I had not been changed when I slamed this site up. Other changes to the temporary notes on the first page. Next step is to update the TOC version and probably take the house applet off the front page:-(
BTW, I think I will leave this page in it's "virginal" un-spell checked form in the spirit of the running "diary" that it has evolved into.

[12:35am 13-May-97]

About all that has happend site-wise is some clean-up of some extra-ordinarily shitty html on the second page. Other than that, I have been fighting for about 30 hrs with an e-mail problem that I am pulling my hair out about. Eudora crashed and took out some fonts. Since than, nothing works right. Netscape Comunicator v4 looks awsome, and I will probably use it, but it crashes on me all the time. I am suspecting a hardware problem now. Infotel modem...get what you pay for I guess. I am in no way sure of this though. Anyone know how to read stack dumps?

[10:55pm 9-May-97]

Well, I did a small amout of changing things around as a result of some feedback regarding mis-loading wallpaper. Note that it really makes quite a difference which browser is in use as to how a page looks and performs. Being kind of an internet addict, I upgrade browsers about a month into the beta test phase (once the big bugs are worked out) so I am able to enjoy the new features that many sites contain. I would recomend the same for others, but I intend to *try* to keep this site usable by all. I spent the day re-learning access, and writing a relational database to track my urls. I really should experiment around with an html parser (?) first because I can see right now that linking the output of a site analyzer (of some sort) to a database is the way to go. Will take some doing though! Oh well...got the database fields set now so if I ever get around to that project, I will have to re-write the database I suppose.


[1:15am 9-May-97]

Since last entry, filled in *something* for all of the pages, put some more images up (though without access to a scanner, I don't have many options.) and did some debuging and corrections. Site will probably remain more or less static now for a while while develop my organizational methods (and finish getting my drivers in order for win-NT, sell my panel van, interview for a job, etc.)


[5:45pm 8-May-97]

Here is my imediate plan for this site: The "one each" nature of the features of this site came about in my experimenting 3 months ago. At this time, I will just put a quick and dirty entry in each of the pages so there is *something* there. Next I will develope a database for internal use in organizing the site and add some more pages. Changing the skeleton of this site before devising a better organizational method would be unwise, laborious, and exponentially more likely to produce errors.


[2:45am 8-May-97]

OK, here's the deal. I did the work you see here about 3 months ago now. Lost interest, and more importantly, ATT (my ISP) did not host web pages. I noticed that they had a beta test program for their user web page development and signed up. I recently got e-mail saying to go ahead, so I set up a dinky web page using their tools several hours ago. It was so pathetic that I downloaded some FTP software and put up what my previous work (what you see here.) I am quite busy at this time, so I don't know if this page will ever live up to it's promises in this location (AT&T that is). As soon as I have some money, I will probably register a domain name with InterNIC and my address will then be different. Upshot: Don't bookmark this page (as if there was any danger anyway :-)

Now, back to the regularly scheduled programing.....

[About 3 months ago...]

Overall status statement:
My site is in it's very early stages. At this point, I am concentrating on things that will make me look good because I am planning to try to get perspective employers to look at it as a suplement to my resume.

I am still working on the basic structure, and determining the best "naming schemes" for the *huge* number of files that constitute this site. Some complications arise from my use of the TOC, and my desire to make the site accesible to surfers using a variety of browsers. The TOC operates by using a script file which must be updated in parrellel with internal html links.

This is my first attempt at building a web site, and it is commaratively complex reletive to many sites. To help me keep a handle on the file and structure complexity, I use a excel spreadsheet that you are free to download [not yet]. I am running into limitations with the spreadsheet and will may switch to a relational database soon.
Refering Document Chain: "Trunk":"This Site":"Running Diaries"
(Contact &) Site Navigation when not using the tListe applet:
*I* tend to prefer using the Back Arrow, but you are welcome to Jump to the Trunk.
Note: This will maintain your current navigation preference.
Feel free to contact me. If you do so through My Contact Page, then you can read my policy on e-mail and privacy. Else, tomwp@_my_last_name_.com. Also, you may Use the Site Feedback Form