… they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree and said kindly, You may rest a little, now.

Alice looked round her in great surprise. Why, I do believe we've been here under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!

Of course it is, said the Queen. What would you have it?

Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, you'd generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.

A slow sort of country! said the Queen. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

I've had the good fortune to work for some software houses that are systematic about verifying, recording and cataloguing bugs – all of which makes it easier to find and fix them. Such software companies also recognise the need to test thoroughly and treat changes in third-party aspects (whether version of the operating system our customer uses or all their text is in some foreign script) as development, trying not to impinge unduly on background maintenance effort which will have to mop up anything the development team misses. So, where it comes to maintaining software, I've had it about as good as it gets.

Even under optimal circumstances, maintaining software is just like The Queen describes it.

Maintaining my web site

The world tried really hard to teach me that new stuff is A Good Thing. I earn my living maintaining large bodies of software: at least most of which wasn't written by me and much wasn't new when it was written. If that seems like a drop from my younger ambition to chase the riddles left by Einstein's legacy, I have a deep suspicion that new isn't the guide I should have followed if I'd stayed on it: I should attend first to a full understanding of what is supposedly known in the early stages of that path, directing my search initially within that domain, guided by my intuitions of where to go; my suspicion is that most of the answer has been lying in our hands, un-noticed (for a century or so) because it is no longer new yet takes much understanding, so that whatever else there may be in the answer is unseen until this old cranny is properly explored. (The hunt for the right cranny looks more like bug-hunting, interspersed with occasional forrays of fixing, than like development – most of the effort is devoted to groking what's already there, however good or bad it may be.)

I digress, I use convoluted sentences and, even when I don't, I'm not famed for my ability to say things clearly or tersely. It works better if I get feed-back, best if the feed-back is information-rich. I have a steadily growing body of web pages, devoting less time to rationalisation and sub-editing (I shall not pretend to warrant the title Editor – that post is vacant, where I merely fill several others imperfectly) than to writing new stuff. Meanwhile, the internet fills up with … material is the best word I can find for it: some rich in information for one audience, useless to all others; some useful but dull to most audiences; and the whole panoply beyond, including the tiny corners on which most old media focus attention. Finding anything gets harder. In principle, what gets found might be expected to improve: but only in so far as the better finds are recognisable as such to the search engines.

Now, I'm more usually looking for somewhere to find information; but even if I were writing software to search the internet, I'd prefer sites which are well-organised, straightforward and information-rich – even when answering a query in which two competing sites provide the same information (in so far as my software knows how to assess that) as regards the user's query, I want the software to give the one which says most simply. As with Occam, one has to make one's own judgements as to what one considers simpler or, indeed, to answer how much does this say ? – but reasonable folk may hope to agree enough of the time to make it possible to write software which homes in on what folk want.

So, I guess I should stop rambling and tidy up my site, migrating it all to ISO HTML in the process. However, I notice that there's a lot of that to be done and I'm definitely not going to be doing it when I've got my head full of new stuff that I want to write down – though I try to tie it in with what's already present when I can. It will be some time before this site is anywhere near tidy, especially if I keep adding to the mess by writing new stuff. So finally, in Autumn 1999, I realised I should have a page explaining how to cope with the mess – which is clearly here for the foreseeable future. Given that it was already, in its own author's eyes, a mess six and a half years after I first heard of the web, you can be sure it's all the more so three decades (and more) after I wrote my first web page.

Why static web pages ?

All the kool kids moved to social media, the slightly older ones are using content management systems and blogging software; HTML is kinda '90s, so why am I still using it ? And why on a web-server, hosted by some friends of mine, as (mostly) static HTML pages, rather than one of the convenient corporate behemoths that'll drive traffic to my writings and might even pay me money for hosting it, if I let them pester my readers with advertising (and tune my content to grab attention) ?

OK, so I probably mostly answered some of that second question by how I phrased it, but its answer overlaps with one part of an answer to the first: I get to control it – thanks to my friends' kindness in letting me use their server and trusting me to do my own thing for managing the content – and that means the authoritative version of all the content is actually present on a computer I control (as well as the one my friends let me publish it on), which means it'll still be there after some corporate behemoth goes bankrupt or gets taken over by some morally bankrupt spoiled brat of a gazillionaire who decides he doesn't want my sort of content on his latest play-thing's servers. I don't suffer from the delusion that there are – or even should be – large numbers of folk particularly interested in my writings, nor am I inclined to try to trick those for whom it's all irrelevant into visiting it, just to give some advertiser a more precisely tuned audience on whom to inflict their attempts at interfering with decision-making. A lot of the rest of the answer to both questions is quite well put by Jack Rusher in his answer to the corresponding question about why he does his site his own way.

As for the use of raw HTML, rather than a what you see is all you've got user-interface for authoring content, it's what I started out doing in '94, so it had become (through simple practice and habit) easy for me to do by the time there were tools accessible to those who care more about seeing the results as they type; and, in any case, I care more about how that result is achieved and what it takes to achieve it. If the result looks somewhat retro-'90s, that's in large part because what I care about is the ideas and their expression, more than the visual presentation; and, indeed, I prefer to let the reader control the presentation, to fit how they prefer to read, rather than devoting time to controlling the fonts and colour schemes in use, much less the size and shape of the space into which the text (and occasional picture) gets rendered. Sadly so many web-sites insist on controlling that stuff that modern browsers only offer rather limited options to the user for how they can control how they read.

And most of what I care to communicate is tolerably well communicated in text, with a little help from the occasional supporting image, so why use anything more complicated ? Especially as I'm using a version-control system that's better at handling plain text than anything else; and I can write diagrams as plain text, SVG, that the browser will turn into images.

Purpose

It will be easier to make sense of my site for the visitor who bears in mind my purposes in having the site. In particular, my primary purpose is simply to record some of what I know in a more orderly memory (that of my computer) than the one inside my head. Remembering things is something computers do vastly better than I do. My writings took off with the advent of HTML, which provided me with a suitable balance between ease of writing and display issues. This fortuitously made it easy to allow other folk access to what I write; in so far as such access is any use to other folk, this is a delightful bonus, which has encouraged a secondary purpose – to make the site intelligible to other folk too – which is, in any case, well aligned with much of my primary purpose.

The alignment between getting it clear in my head, albeit via my head's computer extension, and making it useful to other folk is worthy of note. It is slightly inaccurate to assert that if I can't explain it to other folk, then I don't undestand it, yet this is near enough to the truth to serve as a useful guide – I'll say what I intend as best I can, even if this is hard for other folk to understand (it may be also for me), but given a choice between two ways of describing a matter, all other matters being near enough equal, I'll prefer the one I imagine other folk better able to understand. It's usually a pretty good guide at a good way of saying the matter.

Status

This page is unfinished. Maybe I'll get back to it some time. Apparently, I thought a seciton on apologiae, rants and kindred detritus might be worth including; but I can't think why. I write haphazardly from time to time, when I feel so inclined. I sometimes update an activity diary, in pages associated with my thoughts of the moment, to reflect what I'm playing with lately.

Maintaining my web site

Why static web pages ?

Purpose

Status

See Also