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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.