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| "What you need is a web
page for your book,” Nate’s e-mail said.
I didn’t think I was interested. I’ve visited the Internet home pages of friends. Most have cumbersome addresses filled with slash marks, symbols, and weird words with the family name at the end of the string. I didn’t want an address like that. “Is ‘www.ericrush.com’ available?” I asked. “Yes it is,” he said. Hmmm. I haven’t the slightest idea how such things work. I can’t visualize the flow of electrons the way my mind’s eye can follow cables from the levers in my hand to the fuel control units on the jet engines at the back of my airplane. I don’t know how web pages are built or where they stay. I haven’t a clue as to how clicking the mouse on my desk makes the arrow on the screen push the little image of a button to bring up a new batch of information. There’s something unnatural about this whole computer business. I guess my age is showing. I’ve seen a couple of web pages Nate Ripley has built and maintains. They look good. I could have probably read some books and bought a program to build my own page, but time is in shorter supply than money at my stage in life, and Nate’s fees sounded reasonable. He offered to whip up a sample for me. He asked a few questions about what I wanted on the page. I didn’t know what I wanted until I started playing around with the idea. I didn’t know what was possible or what was desirable. I knew I didn’t want a lot of fancy graphics and animations that slow things down. Those of us with older, slower computers, go nuts waiting for images to form. I scanned the cover of my book and sent the image to him. A day or so later, Nate sent me one of those long, gibberish Internet addresses so I could see a mockup of what he’d come up with. Pretty neat! The book looks fuzzy, so I need to send him a sharper scan. I didn’t like the background. Blue is beautiful on computer screens, which may be why so many people use it, but blue just isn’t my color. I told Nate I’m more of a brown-and-green kind of guy. My brother didn’t like the green. My sister thought it was the color of hospital rooms. My wife didn’t like the green. Nate’s mother didn’t like it, either. So we changed the background to white. We put in a section telling people who don’t live on the Olympic Peninsula how to order the book. We put in an archive so people can read past columns. Nothing is free, but it’s amazing how inexpensive it is to put your own page on a medium that people can reach from anywhere in the world. It costs a few bucks to register your chosen web address, unless you have a well-known personal or corporate name that some enterprising chap has already registered and will sell to you for whatever you’ll pay. It costs a few bucks to hire someone to build the page for you. And it costs something for a server to do whatever servers do. I think the server is the computer that the electrons that form web pages reside in, but I’m not sure. It could just be the electronic equivalent of the tough kid on the corner who takes your lunch money every day on your way to school. You don’t know why you have to give your money to him, but you know you have to. One of my Internet service providers wanted an arm and a leg. The other wanted only an arm. I went with the one that wanted the arm. It’s a weird feeling, typing in www.ericrush.com and seeing my page appear, knowing that anyone can do that anywhere in the world and see the same thing. It took a couple of minutes to figure out what that feeling is. It’s stage fright. |