Rebooting
My first encounter with the internet was back in 1992, when the university I was working for gave all their teaching staff what was then a state-of-the-art Apple Macintosh with the Pine email client and the first a hard line to the JANET university network. About a year later, I found that one of the first commercial ISPs, Demon Internet, had a server node in Dundee, inside the local telephone area of my house. For ten pounds a month, I had a 56k dial-up connection, an email address (which I still use) and, a few years after that, a small tract of web space.
And so I began to build my first web site. It was pretty basic to begin with, and although it has evolved in fits and starts since then, it's still fairly simple. I picked up HTML pretty quickly, but fell behind the curve when frames, CSS coding and so on were introduced. A few years ago, I pruned back a bunch of unwieldy links and tried to unify the appearance of the main pages, and then . . . well, I let it languish.
It hasn't been updated for three years. In that time I've published a new novel, a new short story collection, an omnibus edition of the Confluence trilogy, and a non-fiction book on Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. And in a few weeks I'll have a new novel out. So it's time to tidy up the web site yet again.
And here it is.
It's still very much a work in progress, and is still incredibly simple, but since all of my output is text-based it doesn't need much in the way of flash and filigree. At some point I'll introduce drop-down sub-menus and some kind of framing. And it might be a good idea to either port the entire thing over to WordPress, or bite the bullet and finally set up my own domain name, something I've never gotten around to because of a) free web hosting and b) the last time I looked, someone was still cybersquatting my name.
But at the moment I simply want to get the poor old thing up to date. I've just added a contact page, and a new free short story, and there are other changes on the way - especially to the section devoted to books in print. Any comments and suggestions welcome.
And so I began to build my first web site. It was pretty basic to begin with, and although it has evolved in fits and starts since then, it's still fairly simple. I picked up HTML pretty quickly, but fell behind the curve when frames, CSS coding and so on were introduced. A few years ago, I pruned back a bunch of unwieldy links and tried to unify the appearance of the main pages, and then . . . well, I let it languish.
It hasn't been updated for three years. In that time I've published a new novel, a new short story collection, an omnibus edition of the Confluence trilogy, and a non-fiction book on Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. And in a few weeks I'll have a new novel out. So it's time to tidy up the web site yet again.
And here it is.
It's still very much a work in progress, and is still incredibly simple, but since all of my output is text-based it doesn't need much in the way of flash and filigree. At some point I'll introduce drop-down sub-menus and some kind of framing. And it might be a good idea to either port the entire thing over to WordPress, or bite the bullet and finally set up my own domain name, something I've never gotten around to because of a) free web hosting and b) the last time I looked, someone was still cybersquatting my name.
But at the moment I simply want to get the poor old thing up to date. I've just added a contact page, and a new free short story, and there are other changes on the way - especially to the section devoted to books in print. Any comments and suggestions welcome.
posted by Paul McAuley at 1:58 pm
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