1996 Site History
This index has the earliest date at the bottom and latest
date at the top so our regular users will have less scrolling.
- December 31, 1996 - Looking back over the year, we saw our highest
number of E-mails arriving on one day - over 300. Talk about overwork!
Out of stock on printed copies of If the subject is Dance Steps . .
. Volume I - A Guide to 72 Country Western Line and Specialty Dances
again. Decide that Internet access is now the only way to get our step
descriptions unless we print for workshops.
- December 1, 1996. If the subject is Dance Steps . . . Volume I
- A Guide to 72 Country Western Line and Specialty Dances, Internet
Edition. From a start of 72 dances with a couple of options, we now
have 127 in final format and over 400 in the total volume. During the
month of November 1996, 156 dances were added or updated at least once.
We've sent out our second listserve mesage, announcing that we went
over 400 dance step descriptions in the library. We're slightly concerned
over how many copies some of our guests will receive. We are concerned
that Pegasus, our E-mail software, appears to duplicate some outbound
messages. We are redesigning our site by adding a splash page and bringing
the text to deeper levels.
- October 23, 1996 - We still can only find one computer in Clayton
High School with Internet access. That computer is serving as the card
catalog/lending database for the schools' libraries. You guessed correctly
that the computers are not able to be used very much by the students
or staff. We still must provide our own ISP to get this site to the
UNC server and we're dropping MindSpring for the faster BellSouth initial
connections and that 28,800 number on my modem bar. $240 annually. The
MindSpring customer service representative in processing my cancellation
asks if I would like to wait until they have 28,800 service before deciding
to cancel. Is he for real? I'm not sure he has a clue.
- October 15, 1996 - Started adding button bar with client side image
map on site pages, which points to a contacts page, eliminating many
hundreds of E-mail changes every time we change ISPs. The only problem
is we can't figure how to add it automatically to all the pages. We
open each of our 300+ pages and add the button bar and client side image
map.
- October 14, 1996 - Sure, I know MindSpring is adding over 100,000
customers at a time. Never saw 28,800 with MindSpring during past ten
days. I agree the call waiting is down from 140 minutes. It has taken
them 10 days or so to straighten out the FTP site access. It works great,
but slowly. Let's try BellSouth and their secret provider. Well it did
take almost two hours to download and install the program (shorter than
a service call to MindSpring), in addition to completion of two service
department calls, and we did see 28,800 again. There are possibilities
with this company. What? Of course we sent out changes of address on
our E-mail for the third time since August 4.
- October 4, 1996 - We've lost our ISP access to the Internet and our
UNC server for about 15 days during the past month. Yes, we experienced
the worst hurricane to hit Raleigh and there were power outages. And
then there were the busy signals. Well, OK. I'll admit, we never saw
a 28,800 line speed since we left NandO. All right, we agree to try
MindSpring for our E-mail and Internet access for $324 annually.
- October 1, 1996 - Now offering over 250 dance step descriptions in
our Internet Dance Library. Our numbers caught up with the government's
collection of consumer pamphlets at Pueblo, Colorado.
- September 12, 1996 - If the subject is Dance Steps . . . Volume
I - A Guide to 72 Country Western Line and Specialty Dances, Internet
Edition. Electronic distribution reduces paper and eliminates postage.
Revised in SGML and HTML for Netscape browsers.
- September 3, 1996 - Eliminated duplicated and subindexes on the site.
It will free up time to get content on the site, instead of just indexes.
It also makes the site somewhat easier to navigate. There are fewer
decisions to make about how to get from one page to the next.
- September 2, 1996 - Found that a holiday weekend is for work. Three
of three off-line browser support products have stopped our browser
from reaching out to the Web for periods of time, but only one manufacturer
ships a repair utility. The search goes on for one that works better.
- August 31, 1996 - Found that an off-line browsing support software
tool set our computer up as a server and redirected our browser so it
would only look at the hard drive. The Internet just became the Intranet.
Removed offending software.
- August 27, 1996 - Parents and students express interest in Internet
posting of student research this year. We'll see if the interest stays
high as the work increases. [It didn't.]
- August 22-29, 1996 - The Black Hole opens and our computer and ISP
go crazy. We can send and receive E-mail via Netscape Navigator Gold
3.0 Beta 6. Netscape will browse on the hard drive, but not on the Internet.
Can't reload Netscape. Find original copy of MS Internet Explorer and
it browses! Attempt to download Version 3 Internet Explorer. It downloads
and installs and browses. It will permit sending but not always receiving
E-mail. Try to switch winsock.dll by downloading Trumpet. It will not
configure. Try to get IE to work again and it won't run. It's off looking
for the dlls that Trumpet renamed. Finally unload Trumpet and get the
dlls back to their original names. Try to use IE to download Netscape.
First two copies downloaded were corrupted. Did Bill Gates stick a pin
in it as Netscape went through IE? Third time works. Netscape has problems
accepting the install. Went to Windows 95 Control Panel and deleted
anything that looked like Netscape in the Load/Unload Software section.
Tried to install Netscape again. Smooth install. It opened and browsed.
Had to reload my preferences. It overwrote my bookmarks and E-mail address
books so had a lot of rebuilding to do. Forgot to find out if it kept
the registration information. Cost 20-30 hours and never found the exact
problem. Also, my ISP insisted that I should ignore the warning that
Windows 95 gave us - That some Internet browsers may need some DNS numbers
filled in, in order to be able to browse other sites. Well ISP, don't
ask how, but it's working now! Posting 323 files/3.1 MB.
- August 13, 1996 - About 2 years ago, we started with NandO as a free
teacher account on its bulletin board (the thing that was used before
the World Wide Web became popular) with a non-graphic approach to the
Internet, then switched to the discounted package of full delivery daily
newspaper and full Internet access via PPP account. The access was about
$168 annually. NandO is now selling out to MindSpring ($324 annually).
MindSpring gets good reviews, but it's not local. We are going to try
Passport, a Raleigh based company - only $180 annually for full access.
These decisions affect our E-mail address, e-mail service, and the time
we spend trying to get files up and down.
- August 12, 1996 - Sandra accepts transfer offer and we begin to broaden
and redefine the site for Clayton High School.
- June 2, 1996 - Site is now approaching 6 months old. We now display
264 files on the site, totalling 2.76 MB, and they are almost all text
(content). Started reworking the site to flattened it out for ease of
use.
- May 15, 1996 - If the subject is Dance Steps . . . Volume I - A
Guide to 72 Country Western Line and Specialty Dances, Third Edition
is posted. We use variable fonts and columns to eliminate wasted paper
and switch back to one dance per page. We changed several dances to
options and added new dances to keep total number the same, started
multiple columns and made minor text changes to create uniform description
of the documents, and kept the stapled version for workshops and spiral
for distribution.
- April 1, 1996 - Defend site to UNC staff. They could not understand
that a K-12 site was attempting to provide content. The suggestion was
that we should be content with posting the staff lists and school schedule.
We thought everyone in the school community knew that, but we plan to
post it next school year.
- March 8, 1996 - Replaced defective hard drive and have both drives
operational. Appreciate Bell South voice mail. Tied phone lines up for
4-6 hours daily March 6-8 downloading and reinstalling our lost software.
We decide not to use frames due to user complaints. Frames appear too
difficult for our main customers at this time.
- March 7, 1996 - Discover that there is a way to avoid the Windows
95 conflict with HoTMetaL and that it really does permit us to directly
load and "instantly" code our pages from the word processor,
instead of manually converting them to HTML. Now you have to realize
that this is after we did over 100 pages with up to 300 key stroke changes
per page. So we are now back to maintaining the site and making the
self imposed weekly update timetable (actually most weeks we are doing
site corrections daily). If we take an E-mail message to HTML, we still
run it through the word processor, save out to HTML, and then do the
final proofing in HoTMetaL. If we forget spell checking, you let us
know.
- March 6, 1996 - Can't handle the cold turkey withdrawal. Gave up on
service center, ran out and bought another drive, and finally configured
it as master and got it to accept boot information and enough DOS files
to get the CD-ROM to reload Windows 95. We discover our most accurate
tape backup is from early December, prior to the University of North
Carolina crash and recovery. We lost a final copy of a book that was
ready to go to the printers, class planning documents, about 2,000 graphics
files, a couple of dozen software programs/upgrades/patches, many configurations,
all E-mail address books and mail lists, about 50 E-mail messages, and
a few hundred hours of data base entries. We were able to retrieve a
set of our site's posted files from the university server. We didn't
do this one right.
- February 29, 1996 - At Garner, our main hard drive acts up. As we
watch the file manager, the fields and directories just disappear. Now
we know what a hard drive crash looks like.
- February 15, 1996 - Surveys showed Netscape held 93% of the market
share. We decide to design the site for Netscape 2.0 and HTML 3 as a
minimum. Tables were added.
|