A new paradigm sweeps clean.
Thursday, April 17th, 1997
In a town where the arrival of spring often means the descent of all manner of pollen and other organic residue, spread over cars, houses, and passers-by like some protective coating of discarded fairy dust, the idea of spring cleaning carries powerful psychological weight.
Clear it out. Wash it off. Put a fresh coat of paint on it. Pressure-wash that mildew away. And start over again.
And it’s with that impetus at back of mind that I backed up the contents of the old Positively Atlanta Georgia site and did exactly that. Whammo! It’s gone! I remember one station promotion director I worked with had trouble with that concept. He had accumulated so much junk in their stillstore that there literally was no room for the new graphics; further, he would writhe in actual pain at the prospect of deleting anything–so I grabbed the key to the stillstore control panel, and before his horrified eyes, blew about 95% of it away.
“Feel better?” I asked.
I don’t think he did.
But I do. And for me, the problem was way beyond simply ‘updating your damn web page,’ the bane of my existence since I first stuck my toe into these digital waters. Yeah, sure, I could quickly replace the page about us in Cholula–which you’ve seen now for about 2 months–with something new, but the problem of old pages and images, cluttered, poorly-organized, hard to keep track of–would remain.
I read a lot on the web about ‘site management tools’ like WebObjects Fusion, but decided to implement a system based on BBEdit & Frontier, because, after all, I used BBEdit for most of my text editing and HTML creation already, and because I’ve been a fan of Dave Winer‘s–even when I don’t agree with him, which is fairly often.
So I plunged in, and this site is the result. It’s in many ways like the one you’re familiar with. And yet, flying in the face of graphics-clogged, java rich sites all around me, this one is actually a much simpler, low-bandwidth design. I’m not even using frames! The header graphic is smaller!
But on the other hand, there’s a convenient index of subjects down the left side, a Media Rare that gives you the big picture, a renovated look at my work, and just generally a better sense of organization. I hope.
And all this revision happens just in time, too, because there’s lots new to pile on here. Please check out the words and images from our recent trips to Mexico (for archaeology) and Las Vegas (for television) by jumping to the Travels page. And for reasons I’m still not clear on, I’ve decided to include a Frequently Asked Questions page as well.
