March 27, 2006

• AllThingsMike website Updates

  

  Sometimes I marvel at how large my personal website has become. It’s amazing to think that it’s been online in one form or another since May 1, 1999, and is still growing.  Sometimes, in the rush to actually get pages online, some of the design details on older pages are either overlooked or delayed, and so the site is always in the process of “construction”. Since I started WhenWordsCollide, this very blog,  I concentrate more on the blog sometimes, and certain parts of the actual website, AllThingsMike, are overlooked.  Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time detailing certain sections of the site. First, I created a “new” cloudscape background for the index page.

   

   

  The last new background was created in Sept. of 2005. I use my own photographs and “tweak” them in the Picture Publisher program so that the photo is dark enough (or light enough) that the text I overlay isn’t difficult to read. The index, or “Home” page, which is the first page you see when you type www.allthingsmike.com into a search box, was not always the main page to AllThingsMike. I still have that page online, called “The News Page” and it was given a facelift this past weekend as well.

  Cosmetic detailing was also done to the History, Half Century, Next 30 Years, and Eternity pages. These are the “tabs” that line the top of the index page. I also worked extensively on the ElectricPoetry website, where I keep all my poetry. I completely redesigned the Aughts section including the individual pages for each year. Now online is a page including all the current poetry for 2006. I still have a lot of transcribing to do for ElectricPoetry, and I want to redesign the individual poetry pages in the Aughts section so they resemble the 2005 and 2006 individual poetry pages like MY LATEST HERE.

  

  The News Page. was originally “Home”. Above is the first “button” displayed on the front page. Before ElectricPoetry, ElectricMovies, and The Betty Boop Pages had their own sites, they were the “Poetry”, the “Movies”, and the ”Betty Boop” section on AllThingsMike. Here are some of the “announcements” and selected section buttons I displayed on ATM back when the site was first established on Homestead in 99.

  statement of purpose

  Written in 1999 and updated in 2001 to reflect the conversion of Homestead to a pay service.

  It was my forty-sixth birthday, May 1,1999

  A fitting day for the birth of a new web presence dedicated to the proposition that all creativity needs a starting point.

  The web was young, and Homestead offered me a chance, with no prior knowledge of HTML coding, to put my creative juices to the test, and come up with the ultimate personal website. I felt renewed, and turned to Homestead for inspiration and tools  for this new age of information.

  I felt I was not getting any older, only wiser with time.

  But time played one of her tricks on me, and after two years, I could see this dream turn into a nightmare.

  A child I am no more, yet I view this existence with childlike wonder.

  I just hope I’m not naive.

  If this can spur but one lone soul to connect to the Universal mind, then my purpose will be fulfilled.

  Now it is over two years since I put up this presence, and have learned much since. One, there is no such thing as permanence on the internet, just like in popular culture, and the word of mouth I so clearly saw giving me thousands upon thousands of readers has not yet materialized. To those who occasionally visit this page who are “regulars” I owe my thanks. Eventually I wish to use this site to expound on everything that interests me, and hopefully interests others. I never visited the chat rooms, so I am not a real internet presence as yet. I also do not find a lot of time to put up new pages and philosophies at a rapid clip, and have only recently acquired the computing power to hopefully build a better webpage. Thanks again for listening,

   

  WEBPAGEPOEM

  5-1-99

  A website perchance art at last, the poet gasps.

  I did not know thee, friend, but I foresaw thee.

  A universal mind, a mind filled with wonder.

  The wonder of a purpose fulfilled.

  The voice calls out for an answer,

  And perchance that answers for eternity.

  A millennium exists in a moment,

  And a moment exists but in time

   

   

  The morning I began this site,  I awoke, spent too long in the shower (seems I spend more time the older I get) and began to regret the passage of time (which of course was passing even while I was thinking because I was spending too much time in the shower.) I have plans. These plans need to be given a berth. This is a work in progress. I have arrived with a whimper. As I take the first babysteps of computer web composing, I will adapt this site, and add others.

   

   

  First shall be blocks of text,

  And here an imported jpg file

  The additions and mergings

  shall take on a life of their own.

  Text boxes shall begat theme pages,

  Which shall begat thumbnails,

  whereupon clicked

  shall give the viewer an unparalled sense of purpose.

  I shall find purpose in the work.

  On ongoing artwork

  incorporating those elements

  which make up my being

   

   

   

  

  This site is under construction, and the construction shall not stop, unless the webmaster dies physically, and by then,hopefully,  we should have agent software that will digitally upgrade the site from the information

  stored in my brain

  which was

  downloaded

  before

  my death.

   

  ---

  

  I think it’s interesting to note that there was even a MikeVideo page on the original site. The link takes you to the “new” MIkeVideo site created last year, but the original page is still online, with most of the original text. (although the links don’t work.) I was streaming video from AllThingsMike in the early days, even though most people didn’t have fast enough computers, and the video quality sucked.

  

  The Philosophy section is another old page which transformed into both the Cultural Blender site and the Universal Blog. There was going to be an updated news parody site called Hearsay.com which I put online in 2001, but after Sept. 11 of that year, I really didn’t feel like making fun of the news. The first full set of pages on Philosophy was “The Book of the Realizations”. the personal story about my search for enlightenment which culminates in the essays written on The Universal Blog.

   

  I also worked on a new “title credit sequence” for my Video Blogs, which will be presented here on WhenWordsCollide about once a month. It takes a little time to create all these pages, and then more time to go back and “update” them occasionally. The AllThingsMike Universe is a large one, but it has been fun and eventful putting it all together. I still enjoy it when I receive guestbook entries or comments on the blog from people who’ve actually clicked some of the many links I always supply to my personal website, and have gone exploring.

   

  Some people think that spending time online is a waste. I have always hoped  I am spending quality time creating my “electronic experiement in art”, the AllThingsMike Webhub.

   

  

   

  • 9:53 am
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