The Story of the Gateway
Once upon a time, way back in 1996, a schoolboy made his technically-challenged mum a simple webpage. What he hadn't bargained for was that Mum would love her page and want to make it bigger... better... and, yes, in the fullness of time, weirder.
That little Angelfire page is still there, and, incredibly, it still gets traffic, but as the site outgrew its tiny niche, it became a portal, leading to a new site. By now, it was 1998, and the schoolboy was a young man. In the bustle of leaving his home state for a new life and career, he found the time to train his mum in the art of simple webpage maintenance, using MS Word, a scanner, an ancient copy of Photoshop and CUTEftp. Painstakingly, he wrote down every minute step in terms a 40ish woman could understand. For months, she consulted those notes at every opportunity, and, as her confidence increased, so did the webpage.
A setback when her host froze all free sites meant another move, this time to 50Megs. For the first time, the website had a name it was possible to remember without spelling it out letter by letter and slash by slash. The web design part of MS Word corrupted, and the photographs began to upload in odd shapes and unexpected places. Enter Frontpage. Another tutorial from the young man (now an LAC in the RAAF) soon had the site underway once more, and a small digital camera to replace the scanner made things even better.
At about this point, the still technically-awkward author faced yet another change of email as her ISP was taken over yet again. Fed up with obsolete links on other people's sites, with letterhead paper with incorrect e-mail and with people failing to find her website because it lacked the www they expected, she solved the problem by buying a domain name, complete with a matching and, she hopes, permanent e-mail address.
Enter www.sallyodgers.com, the site from which you are reading this. The site is not, and never was, big enough to carry the whole maze of pages and links that occupied the 50Megs site... how could it be when it is 10 megs in size? But www.sallyodgers.com, easy to find, easy to remember, and easy to operate, became the centre of operations, while the bulk of the information remained at 50Megs.
Meanwhile, two subsidiary pages, Affordable Assessments and Jack Russell: Dog Detective, outgrew their long addresses. It seemed a good idea to give them sites of their own, so two more domain names joined the pack. Now www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and www.jackrusselldogdective.com are separate domains. A Livejournal blog called "Down Mill Lane" proved a little difficult to use, because of the necessity for a complex password which our still challenged author could never remember. That blog, like the Angelfire site, still exists, and is still occasionally updated. Most recently, it has been joined by the easier to handle http://spinningpearls.blogspot.com .
And so comes the current state of play in January 2008. A dozen years have passed. The author is still technologically innocent. Her websites have become many and complex, with pages untouched and unremembered since 1998. Every so often, she discovers one, an apparent orphan on the net, which has long since lost all linkages with its parental site. But it doesn't matter. The internet is a splendid haven for archeologists, with many fossils to be chipped from it far-flung galactic spirals. And is a fossil page any worse than that author photo, taken when our author was a young woman of 27, that still lurks in school libraries to mystify unwary children when they meet the current incarnation of that face 23 years on?
Over the years, the author has driven back many who would teach her how to make a "proper" site. It is true, she admits, that her site(s) resemble most authorial webhomes as a riotous cottage garden does a formal border, but she likes it like that. The chaos reflects her personality, just as the home-made backgrounds reflect her long-time wish to be more artistic than she is. A few years ago, the young man, who is now a husband, a corporal and as fine a son as anyone could ever want, suggested the pages should come down to be remade and rerouted and otherwise remodelled. After a few hours' study, however, this professional technician withdrew his suggestion with the respectful comment that... 'Ma, if you take that lot down, you'll never get it up again. Just leave it alone.'
And so she has - except for adding more pages now and then! Lately, another problem has arisen. Front Page is no longer made, and this old computer is aging fast. The metallic home of Sally's world on the web should really change to a sleek and modern laptop... but without Front Page, it cannot be moved. It's a dilemma, but this too shall pass. The young man comes home tomorrow for a fleeting visit. His mother will lay the problem in his lap and he, in his wisdom, will find a solution.
He always does.
So... what of this Gateway? Its purpose is simply to direct you, the enquiring visitor, to the site, or sites you were hoping you had found.