ferrellweb

mr. ferrell's class web site!

There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on.

—Robert Byrne

A Brief History

Here's a bit about where my site has been over the years. I began messing with a class web site in 1996 or 1997, using a free program called AOLpress, an early WYSIWYG editor that is still kicking around out there. It never occurred to me to save this stuff, so the graphics from that very first web site are long gone. (All for the best, no doubt!) The shots below are cobbled together from bits culled from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, bless 'em! Click the thumbnails below to load a full page image. (They average about 300KB, if that's important to you...)

The Atheneum, c. 1999 The Atheneum, 1999

My first "real" class web site was called The Atheneum, and was hosted on one of the Rhea County Education Department's first servers. Its address was something awful like http://mac.rhea-lea.rhea.k12.tn.us/schools/rchs/ferrellj/, so I relied on redirection services to make it a little more palatable! I think this one could also be found at http://surf.to/the.atheneum.

The site itself was put together with a program called Claris Home Page (discontinued in 2001) on a school Macintosh 5300/100 LC. Each section featured artwork from William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer.

The Atheneum, c. 2001 The Atheneum, 2001

By 2001, I was producing The Atheneum on my very own Power Macintosh G3, using Adobe's GoLive 4.0 to help handle the insanely complicated (for me, at least) tables I was using for layout. I began paying for hosting at Freeservers.com, and the address changed to http://atheneum.8m.com.

The year 2000 saw the introduction of the awkwardly-named AtheneuMUSH, which got its own section on the site. The graphics and colors became more subdued, and the Chaucer header pictures disappeared, replaced with photos to help identify each section.

Ferrellweb, c. 2003 Ferrellweb, 2003

After suffering through a few years of "What's your web site again? What?" I decided to dispense with the fancy name and go with something more utilitarian—thus Ferrellweb. I figured I'd spring for my own domain name while I was at it, so I could just slap a ".com" on the end, and be done with it. Hosting changed, too, to Surpass Hosting, so I could take advantage of more sophisticated scripting and cgi possibilities.

This version of the site was a complete paradigm shift for me: not only had I discovered this "blog" thing, but I was beginning to learn how to use CSS for layout, as well. GoLive went out the window, as I found it easier and more convenient to use a plain old text editor to construct pages. (Who would have thought!)

This version featured class logs for the first time, since Movable Type made it easy to post and archive updates. The design was ruthlessly pillaged from Didier Hilhorst's Release One design at the CSS Zen Garden, as I tried to get my CSS-legs about me.

Ferrellweb, c. 2003 Ferrellweb, 2004

One year later, I switched my blogging system to WordPress, and figured I'd re-design from the ground up while I was at it. I opened up a couple of blank documents in BBEdit on my Quicksilver G4, and wrote my first stylesheet from scratch. The design still resembles the 2003 version, but the underpinnings are mine, all mine. I've been learning a teensy bit of PHP as I go, to help spice things up.