In September 2003, I noticed that my ISP provided me with a small amount of free web space, so I learned a little HTML and started fooling around with a homepage. It was text only for a very short time (as seen at top right), but I soon added images. Once I added images, the look of my homepage (middle right) and of my other web pages remained largely unchanged until 2009. I used my site for posting photos but little else. I got a domain name and a bunch of space in 2009, so I moved my website and started uploading lots of data. I learned enough CSS, PHP, and MYSQL to write active content.
My website still consists almost entirely of photos, but lately I'm writing many more non-photo pages. As of January 2010, my homepage links directly to about 50 other pages. All of my digital photos (about 25,000, accessible through about 600 index pages) and almost all of my dad's 35mm slides (about 3,000, 150 index pages) are online too. Photos are searchable by tag, though pre-2009 photos remain mostly untagged. The web-accessible material uses about 50 GB, almost all of it for photos.
When my brother David died in 2006, I posted a copy of his website on my web space for archival purposes. I thought Comcast would remove his website as soon as he stopped paying his cable bill. His original site remained up and running for more than four years after his death, but now it's gone. My web space also hosts my son Alexander's website. It hosts the Earplay audio archive too, but this will soon move to the Earplay site.
I care more about content than about presentation, and often I'm more interested in figuring out how to do something than in the result of doing it. As I result, I write pages using a simple text editor, not with an HTML editor. I've always been a big fan of standards and portability, so I try to keep pages compliant with W3C standards; the little W3C icons at the bottom of each page are mostly a convenience for me, letting me find bugs during composition.
I have generally found consulting work through personal contacts, so the Ness Software Works portion of my website is very thin. It contains a fairly current résumé and some document links but nothing else.
Thumbnails are likely to be missing and links are likely to not work in old homepages as preserved here.
Some old pages have survived almost unchanged since 2003. Some are in serious need of updating.
My current homepage (bottom right) is written in PHP. It does not use Java or Javascript, just pure portable CSS and HTML. Thanks to Eric Meyer for the popup idea.
Never a shortage of projects:
So much to do, so little time...
