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Field Guide to Home Pages
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1994-09-18
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A FIELD GUIDE TO HOME PAGES
A personal home page occupies a unique niche on the World Wide Web: it
represents the Web at its most basic and at its most eccentric. We can
lay the blame for this multiple personality disorder on evolution.
Because from simple text-based roots in Cern, the WWW home page has
rapidly grown into a flexible self-publishing tool: it can now serve
as anything from a conservative, professional-looking front door on
the Net, to a medium of personal expression that intersects with
autobiography, e-zines, and science fiction.
The home page varieties described in the following Field Guide point
to some of the more interesting and popular manifestations of genus
home page. And although the habitats and breeding ranges of home page
creators have been left to future field guides, the following
categories, at least, offer an early attempt to describe the evolution
of a species.
* The Elementary Home Page
* The Homeric Page
* The Homestead Page
* The Home Office
* The Home Pageant
The Elementary Home Page
Home pages created by elementary school students have a number of
admirable qualities: they are charming testaments to the virtue of
simplicity; they can be read by the technically intimidated as a form
of online therapy; and finally, an elementary home page can serve as a
vivid reminder, to the grown-up world, of exactly how important sports
and clothes are to people of a certain age, and how mean older sisters
can be.
The Hillside Elementary School, in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, has two
collections of elementary home pages up:
[GO] to the 3rd grade home page
[GO] to the 6th grade home pages
Fifth grade students in the Grand River Elementary Students, in
Lansing, Michigan, have also created a collection of elementary home
pages.
[GO] to the Grand River home pages
The Homeric Page
As in epics, and legendary characters, and feats of poetic
imagination, and odysseys. Sometimes a home page just grows and grows
and starts to take on a life of its own. This has apparently happened
to Andrew Tong's home page, which now represents Tong and his alter
ego, werdna. The real life progenitor of biancaTroll, however, seems
to have vanished altogether, leaving behind a very real, but
eccentric, guide to Chicago, and a very unreal, yet extremely
detailed, map of biancaTroll's imaginary world.
[GO] to Andrew Tong's Home Page
[GO] to biancaTroll's Home Page
The Homestead Page
Phoebe Sengers, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University
(Computer Science and Literary and Cultural Theory) has expanded her
home page to include a virtual WWW house, "a cozy Home on the Net,"
that includes links to a home office (with work related resources), a
music studio (with a heavy emphasis on accordions),a playroom, a
picture gallery, a chapel (a daily horoscope, the WWW Bible Gateway, a
virtual confession booth, a cyber-shrine to Kurt Cobain), a kitchen,
and short list of her favorite virtual neighbors at CMU. Sengers,
obviously, has decided to take the "home" part of the home page
metaphor, and stretch it to its limits. It will be interesting to see
how far she'll take the concept: will she put in an attic? Or a
basement? And when will she start poking around in her back yard?
[GO] to Phoebe Sengers Home Page
The Home Office
The most common home page on the Web, by far. A home office page is
pragmatic and to the point. There's a short bio, maybe a resume, a
list of publications, office hours, email and postal addresses, and
links to work-related resources on the Internet. There are variations,
however. For example, Jim Croft, the director of the botany section of
the Australian National Botanic Gardens, has a home/office page up
that satisfies all the classic requirements, but he's also included a
few extras: pictures of the Australian Botanic Gardens, and the Papua
New Guinea National Herbarium, a list of aversions and vices, and a
series of self-portraits: "as I like to remember myself," "as I like
others to see me," and "how I feel -- the reality today."
Budi Rahardjo, a graduate student at the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada, has taken a different approach to the home/office
page dichotomy. He has constructed two very different, linked, home
pages: a "formal" home page and an "informal" home page. Rahardjo's
formal page features a stiff-looking studio portrait in formal attire.
The information is spare and official-sounding: degree sought,
research area, advisor, expected year of graduation, thesis title,
etc. Click on Rahardjo's link to his "informal" page, however, and a
very different Budi emerges, starting with a smiling casual portrait
in an open-necked shirt and extending to some energetic discussions of
progressive rock'n'roll and Indonesian jazz fusion. Rahardjo's
two-sided home page nicely straddles the gap between home and office
pages.
[GO] to Jim Croft's home page
[GO] to Budi Rahardjo's home page
The Home Pageant
Some home pages cause you to worry about their creators' sleep
patterns. Rei's Home Page, created by Eri Izawa, triggers immediate
concern in this regard. Densely loaded with imagery, links, lists,
documents, recipes, and writings, it opens up like a series of Chinese
boxes, one inside the other. You almost have to put it on your hotlist
if you're ever going to get to the bottom of it. As Rei's clamorous
parade of content scrolls up the screen, one cannot help but be struck
by how compact and economical HTML really is, and how it will be
webmasters like Izawa who will continue to expand its capacity.
Ranjit Bhatnager has a similar approach to his home page, opening with
an anonymous quote that reveals his approach: "I couldn't think of
anything else to do with it, so I put it on the Web."
What Bhatnager has put up, in Ranjit's HTTP Playground, is an
over-the-top deluge of content, some of which appears to be almost
improvisational in nature. ("Poster Child for the Apocalypse...The
phrase just popped into my head a few minutes ago. What does it mean?
I have no idea. Email me your interpretation..."). If you're worried
about Internet traffic, and frivolous uses of WWW technology, this is
not the home page for you. But if you want to see just how much a
single individual, and a Mac IIx with a very slow disk drive, can
contribute to the World Wide Web, Ranjit's HTTP Playground is worth a
visit.
[GO] to Rei's Home Page
[GO] to Ranjit's HTTP Playground
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