For 11/7/96 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 689 words

Tangled web

Webheads of Benicia, unite.

I've been surfing around looking at all the Benicia-related web sites. We have a lot of them. Wouldn't it be swell if we could interlink them all and agree on a Primary Home Page?

I didn't start out to look at city sites. I was doing my mentor thing, tabulating and contacting all the school district sites. Most every school has a web presence, plus lots of clubs and student newspapers have begun electronic publishing, but we've yet to agree on and organize a Primary Home Page. We need a jumping-off point, a Central Land 'O' Links that Internet users can start from to reach any BUSD school-related Web Site.

Several people have started such pages, but with no collaboration from others who are duplicating those services. Also, no one has committed to maintain the site and handle address changes and updates. We're working on that.

Another problem is that the primary page should be easy to remember. We have a server at the high school, but the address - http://ws213.benicia.k12.ca.us - is hard to remember. It wouldn't make a good entry point. An equally forgettable school server is http://busd.benicia.k12.ca.us. Not even a jingle would help that one. We also have space on the Hermes server, but that name is even harder to recall - http://bayvax.decus.org/www/hermes/bhs.

My newspaper has a more memorable page - http://www.community.net/~paw - but the high school newspaper should be a branch, not the trunk of our web tree.

One of my students, Megan Cress, a junior who took to HTML like a planet takes to the sun, has recently secured us some free space at http://www.foothold.com/~bhs. That would make a good Primary Home Page, unless we get our own domain name, like http://www.busd.com, or something better comes along. Of course, we haven't collaborated on this site either, yet. We need a meeting.

We want our network to include more than each school's Home Page. Many teachers and students have created fantastic Home Pages of their own, but they aren't listed anywhere. We want to bring everyone into the fold.

For a year my newspaper has maintained a student and graduate email address page. Students post a biography and an email link; when they move to college, they mail back their new college email and we post it so old friends who are in colleges across the country can find each other at the hub. (Parents, if your BUSD grads are in college, or beyond, please encourage them to write to us and get on the list. Send email biography and the year they graduated to paw@community.net.)

Now, back to the city pages. I visited three, asked for free advice at two of them, and got it. One excellent page is www.ci.benicia.ca.us. It is musical and offers many useful links. Chris Picone from Imagination Unlimited, the company that built the pages, wrote and offered his full support in organizing and training the students. Another great site is BeniciaOnline.com, which offers great local links, including individual home pages. It even has my Different Drummer Web Site listed. The third Site has the best name --- www.benicia.com. It is owned by Century 21.

I'm hoping that once we get our school pages in order we can cross-reference to other local page makers and create a Cyber Community. If you run a web page and would like linked to our web pages, send us mail at paw@community.net.

If you would like to create your own Web Page, you can get free space at http://www.geocities.com. Even if you don't, you should visit Geocities because it is one highly developed electronic community.

I got on this Web kick after the CUE Conference. The Microsoft booth encouraged me to download their beta version of FrontPage, a 30-meg TOTAL Web Site Manager Tool. I needed it because my Different Drummer webmaster, Dan Stangel, moved to college and hasn't the time to maintain my pages anymore. I had to make my own. Once I started playing with FrontPage, I couldn't stop. I began getting grandiose ideas about unifying all the other Benicia Webheads. That's where I'm at now. My new site is www.community.net/~gibbo.

Return to Main