About Me
As a retired English teacher, author, and self-taught/self-teaching naturalist, I’m an unlikely candidate to have become an adventurer in cyberspace, but here I am in spite of myself. My adventure began when I decided to retire from deadlines, which meant my teaching and writing, and discovered that before I could retire completely, I would have to buy a computer to get the last of my books back in print courtesy of a print-on-demand publishing company. As it turned out, that silly little tangerine-orange iBook I bought back in 2000 lured me off in directions I never could have dreamed of….
My first adventure was a Web site courtesy of my Mac help person, who happened to be a Web designer when she wasn’t helping idiots like me learn how to use their new computers. After she had taught me enough basics that I was comfortable turning my iBook on and playing with it, she taught me how to use search engines to look up information on the natural history subjects that have always interested me. Then she suggested that I could have my own Web site to share what I was learning. Thus began my first retirement project: A NATURALIST’S ALMANAC AND BOOK OF DAYS. I decided to post summaries of what I had learned from my Web research on a popular interest Web site where people could read my reports and make use of the materials I had unearthed for my own edification. My goal was ambitious: 367 units of date-based natural history information — yes, 367 with leap day and a one-time-only February 30, which is a long story…. I was also annotating the best of the natural history Web sites I was finding and constantly looking for new and better reference books on the subjects I was researching.
After launching that first Web site late in the year 2000 with the humble recognition that completing it as I envisioned it would take me the rest of my life, I conceptualized a second Web site called the VERMONT ALMANAC — and actually completed it in 2002. I used detailed data from the Burlington, Vermont office of the National Weather Service and historic facts from David Ludlum’s Vermont Weather Book to provide information specific to Vermont for every month and every day of the year.
Then I discovered the blogosphere…. As I was developing my two Web sites, I was also taking my customary nature walks and adding to the dated records I’ve been keeping since 1978. It occurred to me that what I called my “Naturalist’s Journal” should be available online too, and about then I discovered Pyra Labs and their new invention called “web logs,” which soon became known as “blogs.” Having been such a latecomer to computers, I find it amusing that I was actually a pioneer among bloggers. I saw Pyra Lab’s web logs as searchable archives and began typing my Naturalist’s Journal entries into their format as fast as I could. But then Google bought Pyra Lab’s proto-Blogger and changed some key rules. Pyra Labs had let me backdate my entries as far as I needed to to accommodate all my journal entries, but Google decided to allow backdating only as far as 1990. It took me a while to recover from that blow, but eventually I began exploring the evolving blogosphere for a blogging site that would enable me to create a searchable archive back to 1978. It took me a while — and numerous disappointments and setbacks — but I finally settled on WordPress, which will accomodate all my NATURALIST’S JOURNAL entries. By 2005 I was ready to start blogging my handwritten notes all over again, and my searchable archive has been growing both backward and forward as fast as I can find the time to post my entries.
Of course once I discovered that blogs could be used for things other than searchable archives, I began creating new ones for my different moods, mindsets, and interests. This NATURALIST IN CYBERSPACE is my most recent blog, and I intend to use it as a portal to the various CyberProjects I’ve undertaken since the computer I bought in the year 2000 lured me into cyberspace….
Comments»
No comments yet — be the first.