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About This Site

Introduction

This personal web site is an ongoing experiment in knowledge management, knowledge reuse, and designing knowledge structures for reuse and evolution. I use a Template Page for site pages.

I do love the web, but I think "World Wide Quilt" or "World Wide Garden" would be a better metaphor for what we create. I put up pages when I'm interested in a topic, need a place to put my notes, and can't find a good resource. After a while I get comments and feedback, and I discover vast troves of information I missed (usually someone has done it much better). I knit my petty efforts into the greater web, linking to excellent resources. In time ideas find one another, evolve, solidify, connect. The pattern grows. I love the process, and I love seeing a seed grow and connect.

Stylesheets and Standards: CSS and HMTL 4

It's 2001. Time to start pushing a little bit, my stylesheet is gradually moving to CSS-1 (eg. 1997 technology). I'm sorry that Netscape 4.x has very weak support for CSS, but it's really past time to move on. I sure hope that Mozilla/Netscape will be made to work, but for now I'm using conservative CSS that works with IE 5.5 and Opera 5.x. I check it with Netscape 4.6 to see if the pages are still readable, but they will look broken up in places.

I dislike standard frames except for my presentations, I do like iframes quite a bit and I may be moving to them in 2001.

I do try to get my metadata tags right (too bad metadata has been so abused on the net, Google ignores it now.)

Ideas and Development

• loose coupling: to enable knowledge and information reuse, knowledge units have to be "loosely coupled". They must have persistent identifiers, and a single unit must be able to participate in multiple "collections". See a somewhat old article on this: An Information Age Curriculum for Medical Students.
• in contrast to loose coupling, in late 2001 I went somewhat retro, and began bundling documents into more easily manageable clumps of PDF. I find the granularity transitions interesting.
• Snippets (a failed effort, but weblogs do something similar and I may try one of those instead)
• knowledge structure design: the usual suspects -- metadata, semantic web, etc. I'm a novice here.
• web presentations: (Old stuff, I need to make a DHTML slide show viewer on of these days) Most of my professional presentations are web based. A standard presentation consists of a glossary (which may be shared), a page of links to related materials (also often shared), documents focusing on "in depth" topics, an introductory page, and a JavaScript based "slide" presentation. "Slides" are intended to be readable on a display screen, but they have additional links and material better suited to independent review. A web presentation has fewer slides than a traditional PowerPoint presentation, but much material is accessed through related links. A single slide may belong to many presentations; such "nexus" slides may include a 'related to' links set (under development).
• structured pages: This page is typical. See template.
  • meta tags: author, keyword, description, link, language, copyright
  • top: links to major site sections
  • title
  • introductory paragraph (similar to meta tag description, also used in the site contents)
  • set of internal links
  • horizontal line
  • content headers in header style (when style sheets are incorporated subsequent text will be indented slightly)
  • footer: horizontal line, disclaimer, contact link

Compression

When file compression is used, I use the zip file format. This is common to most platforms. Stuffit and Zipit can decompress zip files on the Macintosh. Stuffit can be obtained from Aladdin Systems. Some pages use my standard style sheet.

Tools

My major tool for this work is Microsoft FrontPage. The critical value of FP is its ability to manage hyperlinks; and to maintain the entire site as one distributed document. FP has many defects, and I am running into its limits, but I could not do this without it. I also use TextPad, a Windows 95/NT text editor. In the past I've used BBEdit, a Macintosh text editor.

Misc

• Google site search uses their free search service.

• Page Not Found: "404" displays if a URL is typed incorrectly.