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Web Site Maintenence - Re: LA Meteorite Exhibit
Calvin Shipbaugh wrote:
> I encourage anyone on the list with personal experience to
> relate the ease or pitfalls of maintaining meteorite web sites- which is
> done at their own expense.
I have one of the oldest web sites on the Internet in continuous existence. I started it in 1994 as a lark to show off my electronic music and some photographs of fish. Then I added more and more over time.
I had an advantage in that I was a programmer with a lot of experience in networking, TCP/IP, and I knew most of the internet protocols already.
As I became proficient in Photoshop, Java and CGI I advertised as a web developer/designer and I spiffed up the graphics with original designs and organized the entire webspace into a consistent format.
It isn't hard for me to develop web pages or design graphics, but web maintenance is a chore if you have external links or if you have pages that change a lot.
I have a rule that I never put dated or timely material on the web - nothing that has a shelf life of less than eternity. A rule I all too often break.
I have maintained three large indices of specific external web sites: one related to electronic music, one related to aquaculture, and most recently, one related to meteoritics.
I had endeavored to find all relevent links to resources in these topics through the use of personal web agents (Teleport Pro) and user submissions through CGI input.
I would say that the half-life of the average URL is about 6 months, so I ended up spending the majority of my time tracking down stale links and editing moved locations. Recently, I used Linkbot software with good results.
I have also developed webs for others and participate in a group web effort. Group work adds another dimension to the web, one I won't get into here for lack of time.
In the last few months I have altered my life style a bit and I don't spend so much time on the web, so I haven't done any maintenence for about 4 or 5 months and I'm afraid to re-start now. I ended up writing a short message on the link pages saying that the links may be useful but the updates are no longer supported.
One of the things that made me change my maintenence attitude was the amount of junk mail I was getting. I had stopped posting to news groups so I was wondering where everyone was getting my email address? Then one day I got a ad in the email about a web explorer that would garner email addresses from MAILTO URLs on web pages, so I removed all my mailto's and added CGI mailto scripts.
Perhaps by now there are complete tools for maintaining sites that address these problems, I don't know, I still write HTML by hand - I find it much easier to type '
blah, blah...' than look up from the keyboard, find the mouse, find the blasted list icon, ...
I have always paid for my site storage, transfer quotas, and web logging stats, domain fees, etc. but the cost is not too bad, and many people now can get free web sites if they don't mind the advertisement. It would be nice to make some money from the web, too, but is anyone doing that yet?
Anyone with a few hours free time is welcome to explore my webspace at
http://www.arachnaut.org/ >
I have a bunch of articles and rants on webspace design, the hazards of mailto URLs, and similar stuff, as well as search by area features. Be aware that the design of the web is 'small is beautiful' so some of the gratuitous images are actually buttons that do stuff. Once you figure them out you'll see the consistency. And by all means check out the meteorites, I think the image quality is equal to anything you've ever seen in any media. Even better than a museum in some ways, because many specimens are behind glass and too far away to see this kind of detail.
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