The Tale of the Spider caught in the Web of his own weaving.
... as told in response to persistent querys about the Unit102 Web's background ...
I am a scientist and an engineer by vocation, a Web designer never I was. When, in the struggle of our unit to gain recognition, a WebSite became desirable, but given our financial status (negative, that is neck-deep in debt) the cost of professional Web design made it un-attainable ... I have violated the basic military rule of survival, i.e.: never volunteer. In a moment of general visceral weakness I undertook this duty, knowing as much about Web design as about growing collimander in Pushtuland.
To demonstrate what a virgin I was in the bed of WebMastering, consider the name I chose / purchased for us: Unit102.com. You see I've heard all about "dot-com"-s and ".org" (the right suffix) sounded to me as something associated with pornographic sites, as in "orgy".
Additional impetus came from an unexpected quarter: I am an
Aquarius, who believes not in horoscopes; but on the evening of the (above / fateful)
Board - Meeting, while looking for the comics in the paper, I came across
this codex (on the left): how could even a skeptic resist ? "If a sixteen-year old kid with a
turned-around baseball cap on his head can do it in
his mother's garage, so can I", quoth Mike, as he plunged into the non-too-sweet-smelling swamp of offers: "design your own WebSite" /
"let us show you how to build
your very own site" / "... free site for everyone..." /
"Share-ware software only $ 29.95 for
the most beautiful site ever and all the Coke you can drink !" / ...
it was akin to peeling an onion (including the
crying) to unearth the catch in each of the snake-oil offers on the Internet
(believe you me, the number of them is legion ... and I am still getting E-Mail offerings
as follow ups of that investigation) and determine what was wrong with each.
Having selected an ISP (Internet Service Provider), think of that ISP as a Landlord on the Internet, who rents me an apartment in his house (WebServer System), where I can house my WebSite, and can receive guests; ... the Landlord will also guide the visitors to my place (controls the entrance gate and runs the elevators). It was now time to furnish that apartment.
Think of me (the WebDesigner) as an Interior Decorator: look at my computer as the service elevator carrying "up" the furniture we, myself and my women (just like in any family) have selected (i.e.: "uploading to the WebSite"). The "upload password" (I won't tell you ours) is the elevator-key. Have looked at other bridge-sites (other peoples' lodgments) and conceived an idea of how ours should be different (wives take notice!), but this was furniture one had to build by hand! Tried several free and not so free software packages, my computer is littered with the slowly decomposing carcasses of still-born Unit102 WebSites created with those and found wanting.
There is a Roman (as in Julius Caesar, not the 4-4-4-1) proverb: "Fine men own fine things". Following that principle, in desperation, I bought the most expensive program package existing***, on the basis, that if it costs more, it should give better results. Lo and behold, Caesar was right !!! ... it worked and how !
If you are a writer, sometimes the words flow out of your pen by their own volition: the Site became alive exactly as I wanted it, the same way. Not that fast, however. Everything had to be tried and re-tried, discarded and improved, over-and-over until it came together. I never had that much fun building something, since I was fourteen and we built a replica of Falconstone Castle (well, part of it) in our summer place, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountain Range. Worked a steady 14 hours a day on my non-bridge days, 6 less if there was a game ... worse yet, completely forgot, that I was not 14 any more, with results following:
The WebSite in it's final form went "up" midnite March 16th, 2001; had 66 visitors on the 17th, 109 and 110 next two days, and my left arm came "down" with semi-permanent nerve-damage (much worse than the dreaded carpal tunnel) on well-nigh the same day. (You see I am ambidextrous, and my left handles the mouse).
The best disaster story of the Site is, that as a good scientist I always create back-up copies of all my work. Sometime, many months down the line I was making such a backup (starts with deleting, or rather "overwriting" the old backup, thus saving storage-media) and we had a power-failure at the crucial juncture. A phenomenon most disturbing in my household for medical, non-computer reasons. Somehow, having taken care of everything else, when I got back to the machine (well past midnight) I wiped out our entire WebSite (in my computer) by a combination of fuzziness and terminal stupidity.
Cried myself to sleep that night, knowing, that I will have to re-create an enormous amount of work (weeks, literally) from memory and notes, and with a hand crippled to boot. Around five in the morning I woke up with the refrain from a bawdy french (Légion Étrangère) drinking song playing in my mind: "... what goes up, must come down, ma chérie ...". There it was ! If my work from my computer can be "uploaded" to the ISP WebSite (remember the apartment simile), mayhap it can be "downloaded" from there to here too? Oh yes, oh yes, by golly, it can.
Ever since, the Site has been improving, parallel with my arm. According to the "sawbones" it takes four-fold as much time to heal, as it takes to make a baby. There is another difference: the initiation is / was not that enjoyable. The highest count for one day, of people coming to the Site, is 949 (February 23, 2004; the day after our First Regional Tournament) ... ... by this coming year-end (2004) we can expect well over 100,000 visitors and count on a working left arm.
*** Post Script #1: actually the second most expensive one, Microsoft FrontPage 2000, by now upgraded to 2002 (identifying same in response to many kind queries)
*** Post Script #2: we have surpassed the 100,000 visitor mark on October 24, 2004, one day after the 48th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution ... a date well-nigh meaningless to most of our readers, but one, that is responsible for me being here and writing this ...
Sectional visitors Record 685 on January 17, 2005, the day after our January Record Sectional ended.