As someone who was there when it was born and started building websites when they were text only, I have a soft spot for it. So, what sites do I love these days?
INaturalist. That should come as no surprise. I just love looking at the photos, helping folks ID their observations, and tracking my own observations. Want to see what’s found in the ranch? You can see it here!
eBird. I use this mainly to look up birds, but my Merlin IDs are there. I just don’t mark everything I see. However, great bird reference.
Wikipedia. This is where I “do my research.” I learn so much from this site, and it’s easy to go find original sources for what’s in there. I usually Google topics then end up on Wikipedia. We give them money, too, since we use it so much.
Notice that I list all .org sites. They tend to have fewer deceiving redirects, flashing popups, and other things I dislike about commercial sites.
This lovely Fish Crow is on iNat.
So, that answers that question. I’ve spent the afternoon getting settled into my condo for this year’s visit to Hilton Head. I must have screwed up my reservation, because I’m not in an ocean-front room on a high floor. I’d been counting on that for bird observations. My room is also a handicapped room, so the kitchen has interesting features. But that’s okay.
The view is fine. And all the lighting protects the dark sky
I can go out walking if I want birds, and the rooms have been refreshed. It will be fine.
I found lots of birds right across the road from the condo. And this festive grass.
Tomorrow I can go to a nature preserve within walking distance, so I’m set.
Today’s post is prompted by the happy coincidence that I found my very first volunteer nametag while unpacking a box today. It’s from way back in 1994 or 1995, when I was still living in Champaign, Illinois. Before THAT, I’d been an active member in the Champaign-Urbana Computer Users Group, where I met a whole bunch of wonderful nerdy people, including my PC mentor and close friend, Mark Zinzow, and the eventually famous eccentric genius Michael Hart, who was working on Project Gutenberg even back in the late 1980s. (I regret not having time to contribute back then.)
My name tag!
I did that, because I’d been the de facto PC tech person in every job I’d had since I got my first IBM PC (with two, count-em, two! floppy disk drives) to write my dissertation on, and I needed helpers! Yes, I actually knew how everything worked, back in those simpler days and times.
Time passed and I got a fine job working at Wolfram Research as a technical writer (career score #1) (where I got to work with my second eccentric genius friend, Stephen Wolfram). I stayed friends with the PCUG folks, though, hung out on Usenet to learn more. A few years later, after I’d left Wolfran Research to raise my two sons, I saw an ad for classes on the World Wide Web and websites, which was hosted by Prairienet, a community internet kind of deal where many of my old friends were volunteering. The kids’ dad said maybe this newfangled web thing would be a way to keep my tech skills up while raising the kids. I agreed.
I took a class from a wonderful woman named Karen Fletcher, and suddenly I knew enough about HTML to teach classes myself. This was my first technical training experience (career score #2). Karen was a wonderful friend, even keeping me in touch with horses way back then thanks to her partner who was a horse trainer. She was also a Master Gardener, so we hung around with similar folks.
So, while my kids were little and I was learning about breastfeeding from La Leche League (not linking to them), I was also learning about websites from Greg Newby, Karen, Mark, and others over at Prairienet. And hey, here’s a fact I love to share: the first website I ever made was for my LLL group. It didn’t have any images, though. Why? It was before you could put images in! Everything was text! We were lucky we had bold and italic to spice things up. And lots of asterisks.
Bad image, but my copy is in a box.
One of the friends I met in Prairienet was also a coworker, Bruce Pea. What a nice guy. He got it into his head to write a user manual for Prairienet, since he was all techy and understood how it worked. However, he was not a writer by trade, so I stepped in to copy edit that 1995 book, The Prairienet Companion. I can assure you it was a lot easier than copy-editing the Mathematica Book (second edition), which I had also been working on.
This book contained 95% fewer occurrences than the first draft contained. Thank you, past me.
I turned around and one day there I was, a technical writer and trainer specializing in software documentation and training who also built user communities. Careers are weird! It’s mostly luck and coincidence for me, not a path I was driven toward. But I sure had fun between 1985-1995 learning my webmastering chops!
Another fact: I am still friends with Connor Kelly, the first person to ever find out about a La Leche League meeting online. That’s career score #3, because I swiftly combined what I learned on Prairienet with what I was doing in La Leche League, and in just a year or two was on the real internet, making the website of the whole LLL organization (and many others on the side). That led to volunteer-organizational fame, no fortune, and a lot of drama. And in LLL I helped create a user community, like a baby Facebook that failed due to drama and infighting but looked good enough on a resume to keep.
Hmm. I think I just wrote my biography in a half hour. I can’t believe I dredged up all these memories of myself and the internet as we grew up together. I bet my own spouse hadn’t heard so much about what I did during the decade I just summarized. I’m glad I found that little pin.
The Hermits' Rest 