Spending a lot of these hot, muggy days playing on the computer. There are now several Grobius presences on many of the 'free space' web servers -- partly to back up some web pages, partly to get more Internet exposure. Also the Castles and Ancient Monuments site has been moved to a new domain: Britcastles.com. Some fancy new Java menu navigation (also no more of those annoying Tripod.com pop-up ad windows).
Well, we all survived Y2K, but my memory chip went wonky at the beginning of April (about the same time as my cat Budleigh Salterton dropped dead). Didn't know that was the problem at first because diagnostics all passed, so among other possible remedies I reformatted the hard drive and lost everything that couldn't be reloaded from installation disks -- e-mail address books, back e-mail, Internet dial-up settings, passwords, etc. What a pain. Got a new RAM chip last week, so I'm finally back, but on crutches so far, so to speak. (It wasn't Budly's fault, although he liked to sit on the keyboard and interfere with the printer -- he just dropped dead and was only four years old -- what a bummer. But there were a lot of cat hairs gummed up in the innards of the machine.)
Brand new menu pages, but no new material. Try the new front page that has no scrolling necessary. Much cleaner looking too -- very sleek, with a fade-in logo (for MSIE 5.0). (Bloody Japs, but this web page looks better than a Toyota.)
Constantly reorganizing. The latest step was to set up some new domains (on Fishenet): Mysterylist, which contains all of the Grobius mystery novel pages; Imbecility, the new home of the Academy of Arts and Imbecility; Marshmount, the imaginary castles web site; and NetherBrooklyn, official home of the Fishenet Web Ring. Grobius.com itself may be moved off Geocities sooner or later; I'm not that pleased with their service (although not as pissed off at them as I am with America Online, which deleted all the files in my directory there for violating 'family standards'.).
Taxes are done. Time to do some remodelling. The King Arthur site has been redesigned (but not basically changed); try here: www.grobius.com/kingart. My Mystery Novel Site now has a new front page that looks pretty cool. Finally, I have submitted the Divine Platypus to the Great God Contest. Oh, I also changed my home page colors -- got tired of the old stuff. I do have to say that being unemployed sucks, even though I now have plenty of time to mess around with web sites. It becomes very hard to stick to a regular sleeping/eating schedule.
Some things have happened since October, including being downsized from my job after 25 years (the bastards). However, there is now a new web site about Paganism. It still needs more work, but I'm not one to be shy of posting incomplete sites. There is also a brand new site taking advantage of the free web space available these days: Grobius on Angelfire. This is a rearrangement of my photographs that are already on the Internet under different subjects, here more on the lines of a travel photo gallery.
Disaster! I lost the hard drive on my old Gateway 486 computer, and most data and softward for my web sites (what backups there were are mostly very out of date); the web pages can be retrieved from the ISP's, along with the graphics, but this is a major pain. Anyway, a more advanced computer has been purchased, somewhat earlier than expected, and I'm back on-line for the most part. Note that all my e-mail archives, address books, etc. are gone, unfortunately.
Castles, Stone Circles, and Other Ancient Monuments is now over two years old and certainly needs a facelift. I have been adding things to it and revising the older pages constantly, but now it is time for a major overhaul (worth the effort because the site has had nearly 4000 visitors, which makes it very popular for one of my sites). Step 1, after the fancy new picture viewing pages (see below), was the creation of a new Home Page. This is at Castles. But there is still no consistent style, apart from the way the content is written, from one web page to the next, and probably never will be -- one should not expect conformity from this web-meister.
Commercialism. I don't like putting other people's banner ads on my pages, except for the Browser rivals (Netscape and Microsoft) and a few other very useful free or almost free things like WinZip. However, there are several "bookish" pages in the Grobius Domain, and no doubt somebody will get intrigued by a book mentioned there and want to get hold of it. So, wherever relevant, there are now search-engine links to Amazon and Barnes&Noble, the largest online bookselling services. [The fact that I might earn a nickel if you buy a book from them by ordering from my web page shouldn't bother you.]
Playing around with picture viewers of scanned photos of mine related to various websites: (1) Castle Pictures, (2) Picture Gallery, (3) Ancient British Stone Circles. These use various images display methods for use with Internet Browsers, can't decide which, if any, is ideal, but it's fun to play around with them. Whichever way you look at them, they are still my pictures, some of the better and most appropriate ones for these web pages. (They are copyright by the fact that I took, I scanned, I posted, and also put © things here and there -- but I can't stop you from downloading them, just don't try using one for your own profit.)
Created a Master Index of all my web pages (mainly so I can keep track of where and what they are in case they need updating or expanding). There are over 200 HTML documents on this page -- shocking!
Grobius.com is now a domain, hosted (at the moment, anyway) at GEOCITIES. (Its home address there is ~betapisces, but don't get too confused -- that's the way these things work.) Bear with me as I move various web pages from other servers into this one, because some of the links will be flawed.
The Guide to Early European History in Modern Novels is now posted on my site at Geocities. My library of historical novels and fantasies is very large, and this is a methodology for organizing some of them by geographical area. If you are interested in the fictionalization of ancient history, check out this site. Some of the categories are: Ancient Celts, Scandinavia, Rome, Egypt, Germany, and the Stone Age. Additional pages are concerned with Atlantis, Swords and Sorcery, and so on.
Click here to access these pages.
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