Two days ago livingwithmusic.com popped up on the pMachine homepage as a featured site and I have to thank Leslie Camacho and the team over there for going through the trouble. I have to admit that I'm quite proud of being featured there (although it's not the first time - my third site was featured there years ago when I was still using Rick Ellis' pMachine to power it). I have tried a whole number of weblog programs in my time, but pMachine and Expression Engine have been my programs of choice for many years now. There's nothing I can't do with Expression Engine, so why change? Just hop over to the feature on pMachine.com if you'd like to find out a bit more.
Having been featured there and reading again what I said in the interview prompted me to elaborate a bit more here. I hope you have a couple of more minutes - it's going to be a bit longer than usual.
Beginnings
I remember getting involved with the Internet and programming webpages around 1993 or 1994. I still remember the time fondly, diving into David Siegel's articles and books, being a regular on the now defunct glassdog forums, dropping by to see what Raymond Pirouz and G.K. Nelson were up to, getting to know a whole number of excellent websites through them: Melanie Goux's now defunct brushstroke.tv, Catherine Jamieson's consistently excellent photo weblog, and Raye Potts' sorely missed bysandandsea.com (if anyone knows if Raye is up to something online, drop me a line) , to mention but a few.
Things took off in earnest a bit later. You have to remember that I'm a teacher, and in that function I got sucked in even deeper. In or around 1996 our government instigated a program called "Schulen ans Netz (German)", together with German Telekom, Microsoft, IBM and other global players, with the goal of getting at least one computer into every German school. We were early adopters and one solitary PC in a single classroom quickly grew into two computer rooms (about 40 PCs) and more. Besides all the other activities which started sprouting up around that project, I assembled a team of interested students to learn web design together with them. I taught them David Siegel's tricks, usability, typography and lots of other things and our homepages at the time never even got close to those ugly blinking sites of the day. Ajax? My students were designing dynamic web pages and redirecting content into iFrames (while I was watching with my mouth agape) when people were still trying to set up Frontpage properly. The problem was that these meticulously constructed pages only worked in Internet Exploder (version 4, as far as I remember), so we started over again.
All that work got us onto German television twice (NBC GIGA (German), for those who know the station now only available in outer space) but it also simply got to be too much. Today, the team does not exist anymore and a simpler and thus more efficient homepage is run by someone else, but I learned an incredible amount that time, both from my students and from online resources. A bit later, as soon as we became aware of pMachine, we used it exclusively for each and every project until the demise of the team.
Deus62
Oh, the deus62 name. Glad you asked. I was quite authoritarian at the time because we often had to meet at my own place and set up a network there due to the lack of equipment at school. Naturally, when we got all those geeks (incl. the teacher) together in one room, the work often drifted off into playing games or strutting some new geek toy, which I managed to stop, most of the time. So, students started calling me "deus" (Lat., as in "God said we shouldn't...) and when DeusEx, an ego shooter that I admittedly liked myself came out, the name just stuck. Because the name was taken in most forums, I added the 62. The numeral shouldn't be too difficult to figure out, so I'll refrain from an explanation here.
Some of the students are still around as well as very active on the Net (for example Dominik Fritz with his excellent photoblog or "Pepi" Nelis with his eclectic weblog) and I still try to meet with them or at least post over on their sites once in a while.
There have been ups and downs. My health took some heavy hits these past years and my Internet activities basically remained dormant throughout these difficult times, but I always managed to to do the old "Weebles Wobble ..." bit.
9rules
For those of you who actually took the time to sniff around here a bit, you might have discovered the hidden track (God, how I hate those on CDs when after 20 minutes of silence suddenly 1000 watts are blared through the speakers) in which I tried to outline some things for this site when I joined 9rules. I'm sticking to my own 9 rules outlined there, although I haven't been able to update quite as much as I had hoped. But the site is on track and huffin' and puffin' along quite nicely.
Becoming a member of 9rules was another high point in my many years on the Net (pretty much 10 years if the first stumbling steps are ignored). I know that these kinds of networks are at times being criticised for all kinds of things, but for myself, I can say that I have been nothing but happy about the whole thing. I had two reasons for joining up. First of all, I wanted a boost in traffic as becoming a member of a known network got the new site on the map a whole lot faster and secondly, I wanted to get to know some of the people because I had seen some really good stuff on 9rules. Suffice it to say that becoming a member there has proven me right. The traffic went up considerably and the people over there are just great. I don't have much of a financial/business interest, although I wouldn't mind making enough money off the site in a year or two to just cover the expenses, and for me 9rules isn't about that either. It's finding first-rate content and interesting individuals, and they've got that and more, to boot.
I have been following the various blog network skirmishes and have read the sometimes rather harsh criticism that is voiced when one joins one of the bigger players in the game, but to be quite honest, the whole discussion bores me to death. I've been around too long to participate in any of it, and in a few years most people will probably have moved on. The Internet has always been a melting pot of egos and if they didn't assimilate, they either made a load of cash or disappeared into oblivion. It'll be fun to see who gets which.
livingwithmusic.com
So, what's in store for this site? The usual, really. It has been my vision from the start to turn this into a one-stop for people looking for shelf systems to house or frames and other gimmicks to display their sizeable collections, interspersed with some talk about collecting and a few presentations of collector's items worth looking for, and that's where this site is heading. At the moment I have about 50 to 60 more bookmarks to work through, some of which will probably yield 5 or more posts, and the collector's items are appearing at a steady pace, so for the next year or two, I don't see a shortage of material to blog about.
A redesign of this site, which will become necessary at some point (see the pMachine feature), won't be happening until the end of the year or thereabouts. I neither know how my life nor the Internet will be developing, but one thing is pretty sure: if you have subscribed to the feed or if you are just a casual visitor, there's lots more to come here, so stick around.
Here's to another 10 years.
Time for a drink.
One Response to “Featured on pMachine.com” Leave a reply ›
I found your impressive site via pMachine. It is similar to what I am planning for my opera site, so I thought I might contact you. Is that OK? I have just left a site introduction on the pMachine EE forum, but perhaps I may repeat the gist of it here?
My new site is called http://www.operaclicclac.com. It is a revamp (port?) of a large (but 1990s style) international online magazine about opera (Opera japonica http://operajaponica.org), written by a small group of authors and illustrated by professional photographers around the world. The idea is to design the site for adjacent text/photographs, while setting up blogs/sections to hand over to individual writers covering live performances, book reviews, recordings etc.
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