Some of you have wondered (aloud to me) why I have this website - its purpose, target audience, format, and so on. This note is an attempt to answer those queries.
I started out by thinking that I might want a website... this was long ago, back when I was first on a stable Internet connection in the mid-1990—s. That was the old "@Home" service on the early Comcast broadband network, first run independently and then as Excite At Home, which went bankrupt in 2001. Sometime around 1998 or 1999 (I forget exactly when) Comcast offered their own ISP service to replace @Home, and I had to change my email domain suffix from home.com to comcast.net. At first I was very upset at the move and wary of Comcast. But I will tell you now that since the very beginning, my Comcast Internet service has been stellar. {Full Disclosure: I worked for Comcast as a VP for them or their subsidiary QVC from 2000 through 2006, when I “semi-retired” from full-time business employement.} At any rate, I was hooked on the Internet from the days when ARPA-Net was being built to provide an unbreakable national network for government and academia. In the early days of Internet commercialization, we could choose from a variety of national ISP services, including America Online, CompuServe, Erols.com, TIAC, BBN Planet, and Netcom, and a raft of locals. I never liked dial-up service, nor any of the service providers. Thankfully, broadband flourished. I appreciated the @Home service, and later appreciated the reliability of the Comcast network. Yes, I know that there are those who have had poor experiences of one kind or another with Comcast, but at least in my area and in my personal experience, both their provisioning and their service has been excellent.
I secured the ChuckThomas.net URL and put up a placeholder site as an experiment sometime in 2002. I “pounded” some HTML code to get the original site up, and it was pretty primitive. In mid-2003 I signed on for a free 1and1.com account, which included the ability to transfer my URL management and some space on their webservers. So, now I had a web presence... what to do with it?
I designed a new website that was to fill three requirements, which were really to address three targets:
I wanted a static “frame” and easy navigation, and I didn't want to strictly divide the site into sections that would discourage those from one target group from exploring the information available to another target. I wanted to be able to continuously update and/or add content without continuously changing the navigation. I wanted the site to have a “clean” appearance, but to be “interesting” and informative. Above all, I wanted you to get to know me. I coded the site in HTML and JavaScript, with only minor JavaScript to do things that cannot be done in pure HTML.
Over time I continuously added and updated content, but took away very little in order to maintain some historical perspective. I have also experimented with some things. For example, for about a year and a half I had a blog available to the public. Nobody seemed to want to use it, so it has been discarded. I also have a companion site, ChuckThomas.us, which is not kept up to date as frequently as this site, but shares the same content. That site, however, is developed using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a more contemporary way of formatting pages with HTML. It also doesn't use HTML “framesets”, but does use “iframes”. Framesets have been “depreciated” by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), meaning that it is supported in HTML 4.0, but no in the HTML 5.0 standard. This doesn't mean that your browser won't work with this site; it is tested with all forms of Explorer from 3.0 to current, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. This site will be updated as needed to maintain compatibility with browsers used by over 98% of Internet users. The “iframe” discussion is a whole other topic, not for here. The look has changed and the navigation is a little different, but the content (when it is up-to-date) is the same as this site.
A word about my hosting vendor, 1and1.com. My experience with them has been outstanding. Since the beginning, they have been very reliable, inexpensive, robust, and continuously improve their offerings. I have upgraded from the original free account to a business-level account, but it continues to be relatively inexpensive. I have several URLs hosted there, and do projects from time to time. I have never had an issue with their service.
My favorite part of the site is the postings regarding my family. The kids (my grandchildren) have grown so fast and do so many things that it is difficult to keep current. But I try. I also enjoy discussing my teaching activities, and posting about some of my current “work” activities. The most static part of the site is that which relates to my qualifications and professional experiences,mainly due to the fact that much of that is historic and won’t change over time.
Another part of the site that I enjoy keeping up with is the Technology section in my Personal Interests selection. I update the configuration of my household LAN and technology quite frequently, because I constantly play with it. It is an avocation that I enjoy.
I hope this discussion satisfied any curiosities about how I view this website. Enjoy your visit!