About This Site

This Web site is built using the Coriolis Web Authoring System, originally created for this site but now hosting other sites as well.

History

This site started in 1993 as an experiment. The Internet was still unfamiliar to most people, its use mostly confined to military and academic institutions… but it was already clear that the new communications medium was awash in possibilities.

The idea, which came in the middle of the night while I was staying at my mom’s house in rural Wisconsin, was to use this new Internet as a way of sharing (reproductions of) artwork. At the time there was very little Web content but a fair network of sites using the Gopher protocol, which was like a simplified World Wide Web but with a heavy bias towards text content.

I created the first version of the site on a server used for analyzing high-energy physics data, and announced the site on Usenet. Within minutes, the site was receiving hits from all over the world.

The site was moved to a Web server in January of 1994 and garnered over a million hits in the early years… it was still years before the existence of Google, and an exciting time to be putting content online. One of the first people to use the Internet to share images of artwork, I believe I was the first person to create a personal site for my own art (another group-oriented site also created in 1993 was OTIS, later renamed SITO).

As a result of the experience, I wrote this article for Art Department faculty at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, with a followup article for Art Calendar Magazine.

Technical History

After moving from Gopher to HTTP in early 1994, the site underwent many revisions, starting with a handful of hand-rolled HTML pages which were converted to a large set of pages generated by a monster Perl script. More recently, I re-wrote everything in Python to create a large set of static files from a nested directory structure which would be easy to rearrange and to add content to. Scaling issues and new requirements led to the creation of Coriolis Web Authoring System, still under development, but used already for this site and others.

Screenshots of Older Versions