As I said the other night, I greatly increased the number of quotes rotating in the box at right. It’s a fine occupation and one that I’ve done since I was a child — collecting and cataloging quotes.
Many of the blogs that I follow also have collections of quotes or occasionally point to new sources of quotes, for which I am grateful. Imagine my surprise then when today I realize that Bornfamous is now using the same text delivery device as I use – direct from htmlGEAR.
Now I must explain a bit. I had already begun to use GuestWorld guestbooks when I was hired on by Tripod to manage community volunteers. Remember those wonderful days of online life – net communities of like-minded folks sharing information and support via web pages and gathered into forums etc by companies like Tripod? I hit the ground running and much sooner rather than later the ground of that model fell away below my feet. Whether because of guilt at having hired me away from 20+ years of government work for a job that was ending before I got my desk set up, or because of my old-person work ethic I got kept on to do other things.
And my last job there was working for htmlGEAR. This small band of intrepid workers had plans to revolutionize web page building by making the coolest page gadgets ever. What an exciting thing. I worked with them as they planned, developed, tested and launched things. I did membership support for them, answering emailed questions and suffering through the waves of server failures and other things. We worked on and on despite lack of heated offices, adequate funding and staffing and support. It was a good time. The night htmlGEAR launched, we missed a big party at a nearby restaurant because the launch had unexpected bugs. We had our own party of delivered chinese food. We sat around on scavenged furniture with cable reels for tables. Glamourous, eh?
I learned more about how server stuff works than I really wanted to by listening to patient and very-skilled engineers who could make anything happen on your screen with just a few lines of code. I learned to be unafraid of accessing membership info on a Unix database. I learned how to figure out the answers to questions never expressed by the writers. I learned a lot about polite, supportive customer service.
At times like this when I enjoy the product of our work, things like the little textGEAR which rotates bits of text on your web site, I know how much I miss working with those folks and that big idea that was the dot.com/web hosting model.
