You know how easy it is to lose touch with friends, family, and all the important people who make up your life? Well, it's a connected world now and we no longer have an excuse to let good friendships drift away. The White Spot (North) is my attempt to keep all the people in my life up-to-date on what's going on with me and all of us, any time, even if we can't get together as often as we'd like for reasons of time or distance.
Not at all. The White Spot diner in Charlottesville, VA was a gathering place for my college buddies and me during some of the best times of my life. I now live north of it, but the name captures the essence of these pages: a place where old and new friends can gather, have a couple of laughs, and keep in touch with each other.
wspot.com is my home PC and it's where I do all of the work on these pages before I send them out to the World Wide Web. It is a registered domain with the Internic that I renew every year. But as I pay hourly connect charges to Digital Gateway Systems (DGS), I cannot keep it turned on 24 hours a day. So, it's usually on for a couple of hours a few days during the week (I do try to have a life), but certainly never while I'm on my many travels. You could try http://www.wspot.com/ for completely up-to-the-minute Web pages that I will eventually publish, but catching me while my machine is on is a remote possibility, and I'd only get mad at you for tying up my modem.
So, a couple of times a year I try to publish a new bunch of pages and put them out onto www2.dgsys.com, which is available all the time, not just when I'm at home and connected up. Your e-mail to wspot.com will always reach me, since DGS will store it until I connect once again from home.
The Registry is meant to be a one-stop shop for
our Internet addresses. Not a month goes by that
I don't get a request from someone for so-and-so's
address and I thought this would be a good way
to keep us all connected.
Since I realize that there are some who might not want his
or her address published, I open up the Registry
to anyone who specifically asks me to
list his or her address(es). You do not have
to be in the Registry to receive notification of
updates to the White Spot (North).
By its very nature, the White Spot (North) is graphical -- I want to show pictures of all of us! On a slow modem, it may take some time to download a page. I am taking pains to design the pages to be as download-friendly as I can and I have learned a ton since I started (with many thanks for those of you with constructive criticisms).
When you consider that Web sites like The Switchboard can locate anyone in the U.S. and that once you have an address, you can have the good folks at MapBlaster! draw you a map to that address, I'm not divulging any information that can't be gotten very easily. It truly is a different world ...
I use Netscape's Communicator 4.01 suite for Solaris x86 to design these pages. I understand that there are many ways to browse the Web, but let's face it: if I design these pages to HTML v3, I am reaching more than 90% of you. I use Sun Microsystems' HotJava browser to verify the adherence to the HTML v3 specification. Unfortunately, new HTML features are far outrunning the standards bodies' ability to make them universal.