Previous websites and publishing experiments
These are archived sites, so use your back button to return here. The order is chronological, so they start out fairly simple.
Old sites never age well. Browser features and glitches come and go. Stuff happens. My other excuse for how rough these sites appear now is that they were mostly experimental. I'd like to think that the commercial sites I built would have held up better. Of course, by now they're all gone....
My first website demonstrated automation by hacking style. One version was straight html. The other used tables and spacing to force a particular page layout.
I did a little site -- just a page -- about Elisabet Ney, a "cool chick" of days gone by. I was rather proud of automatically running a search.
Another one of my early projects was a team-oriented threaded discussion system. Almost fifteen years ago I worked for a company that tried to make a business of it (a little ahead of their time). It was a total psych that Perl and CGI made it trivial to build the kind of software people were paying big bucks to build back then.
"Chops". I like the term. I write libraries of scripts that "chop" up content to create output that is very much more complicated than the source files.
One early example made it easy to maintain FAQs. Another would take ascii text in block paragraph format and make an html file out of it. Yet another inserted meta tags into html documents.
All of those "Chops" examples were about creating or maintaining single files. I still use them occasionally, but I'm really more interested in software that works on whole websites.
Some guy had a VB program that would do websites with a particular structure. It automated the next/previous/up/home stuff. I used it to put together a site in an afternoon. That's not necessarily so hard, but I wrote all the content. It would be easy to maintain if I had the software any more. I include a link here because I kind of like the "look-and-feel", even if I wouldn't inflict the navigation on anyone.
A more sophisticated program I wrote still tried to keep structure in html files. It still made it possible to have several versions of the same content.
A more sophisticated system started using a database. The content here includes my essay: "The New Publishing: an Information Choreographer's Manifesto". It's sort of informative, and sort of funny. It has plain, css, and pdf versions.
For completeness: my previous website. It was pretty enough, but wholly unautomated. What a pain! Even just a few pages are too many to change by hand.
Those were some of my personal experiments. In between, I built
publishing systems for companies like Sun, U. S. Web, E*TRADE, and
most recently, a company called OneStop.
Copyright © 1998-2011 J. R. Boynton