Garry Garrett's Homepage Garry Garrett's Homepage People have asked me about my homepage: Why do you have a homepage? Why do you keep your homepage so plain? How many hits do you get? I thought I might explain, for the curious, my views on these issues.
I started using web browsers when Mosaic was the web browser and the only other graphical one out there was Chello. This was before the days of Netscape, before the days of bookmarks (favorites if you use Internet Explorer), before the days of search engines (for the web anyway, Archie searched FTP servers, Veronica and Jughead searched "gopherspace", etc.). All of us "on the web", learned just enough HTML to create a small file with links to all the cool places that we had found. These were essentially our "bookmark" files. This is the page that you would set your web browser to point to as it's "home" or starting page. You would put your "homepage" out on a server that other people could get to. If you found someone who had similar interests, you made a link to their homepage from your homepage, and then as they found more web sites, you could benefit from their explorations, and vice versa (as they would most likely put a link from their homepage to yours). You learned about new web pages largely from word of mouth (often times in newsgroups or listservs that you followed that interested you). This inter-linking network of homepages is what earned "the web" its name.
This is still pretty much how I use my web page today. I see no point in bookmarking things in my web browser. I can get to my homepage from home or work or a friend's house, etc. I can't get to my bookmark file on my computer at work from home, or vice versa. If I see a page that I might want to come back to again, maybe because I like it, maybe because I disagree with what it has to say, maybe because it references someone that I know, whatever the reason, I put a link to it on my homepage. I also now have a number of friends and relatives who are getting onto the web and so some of the subjects that I have added pages for are for their benefit and not for my own. Do not mistake a link on my web page for an endorsement. Many of the links are there because I (or a friend or family member) do find it interesting, but that is not always the case.
I don't care how many "hits" my homepage gets. I make my web page for me (and some family and friends), and if anyone else finds it useful, good for them. If hits are what you are after, you either need to "own" a subject (if you like butterflies, then perhaps you make your pages have every link to every page that has anything remotely to do with butterflies), or you need some good original content (if you are good at doing your taxes, and you write up a great page on how to do your own taxes, people will flock to your page for the good solid information). I don't pretend to "own" any particular subject (there are some subjects that I might like to corner the market on, solely because they are subjects that interest me, and not because it will get me more hits), and while I have some original content, I don't have very much and I don't pretend to be that good of an author. I doubt I'll ever get a huge amount of hits, but then again, I'll never know because I never check, because... I don't care.
Lastly, I keep my web pages simple. One reason is that I want them to be readable by any browser (I strongly agree with the AnyBrowser campaign ), including text based ones, black and white ones, etc. I strongly believe that HTML has gone seriously downhill since control of the look and feel of web pages was wrested away from the person viewing the document and given over to the document's author. You will rarely see me stray into things that go beyond HTML 2.0, because most of what has been added to HTML since is a bad idea. Take fonts for instance. Your average PC goes down to about 8 or 9 point fonts (points is a measure of the height of the letters), whereas a web browser on a unix box go down to 1 point fonts. When you say that the font size is "1", on a PC that gets you an 8 point font. On a unix box, it gets you a 1 point font (good luck reading it). I hit one of these pages I have to ask myself what the author thought that overriding the font sizes that I specified in my web browser bought them? I have as of yet to see a web page that benefited from this. The things that I do use are things that are consistent with the notion that the viewer, not the author, should be in control of the look of the document (no fonts, colors, etc., but perhaps tables, etc.). I strongly believe in content. A lot of the flash and glitz that has been added to HTML takes forever to download, takes up a lot of space, and has very little meaningful content. You should not be upset that your web page does not look exactly the same on my web browser as it does on yours; you should be satisfied that it looks equivalent. Otherwise, you miss the whole point of the web. A picture does take a thousand words (more like 50 thousand these days), choose those words wisely or else all your picture says is "blah, blah, blah, blah".
At this point, my web page is, for the most part, a bunch of bullet point lists of links (but then again, isn't that about what your bookmark file is, only mine is a little more annotated). If I get a little more original content (I have lots of stuff I've written that isn't on my homepage that does have a little more style to it), I'll probably get a little more fancy. Until then, enjoy what I do have (or don't; I don't care, with the exception of this page, I wrote these pages pretty much for me).
PS: Occasionally, you will see a |>...<| throughout these pages. To the program that I use to edit these files, this is a kind of shortcut to fill in a blank. Basically, it's a blank that I have not filled in yet. As with most pages on the web, these are a constant work in progress.
