Welcome to my personal WWW site. Maury

This whole thing began, over ten years ago now [On August 8, 1995, at 9:44 am (but who's counting?)], when I decided to learn how to create a site on the (fairly new) World Wide Web. I had never, at the time, heard of hypertext or HTML or FTP or CGI and had to learn about each of them. CSS, JavaScript and PNG files weren't in existence. My first book on HTML emboldened me but I had to have some content. That's when I wrote a little essay about my friend Lao Zi (although I spelled his name differently in those days). It wasn't for five or six years that I realized that a bunch of people were finding it. I did a Yahoo! search for "Lao Tse" (there was no Google yet) and found my site was the first returned. That's when I decided that the World Wide Web could be dangerous. I mean, I had (and still have) no credentials whatsoever to present myself as even knowledgeable, much less as an expert, on Lao Zi and yet people were clearly coming to my essay for information. Oops!

I have to say, though, that it has also been a pleasant experience. Getting notes about stuff I've written and posted to this site is always fun for me. But the site remains a place for me to learn. Not too long after it was begun I started adding stuff. First (as I remember it) an essay about dream work and another about my experiences using Linux (still, of course, my favorite operating system). And then one about baseball and my visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. And with them I learned how to deal with and I added my first graphics. (Big breakthrough.)

XHTML and CSS were great eye openers and I immediately revised all of my docs to make use of them. It all remains fun to experiment with. A few years ago I added the list of people who make me smile and about a year ago I made the graphics files explode when your mouse' pointer goes over them. And then this morning, just before writing this, I added a "shadow" to the text on the very top line of the home page. It was easy (three short lines of code and a two-word addition to an existing one) and it looks kinda silly. I s'pose I'll take it down in a few weeks when I get tired of looking at it, but the whole point of the Web site (for me) is to learn how stuff is done. (Btw, I'm already looking forward to the next versions of CSS and XHTML. They're gonna be real fun and I have plans to completely revise the site once again.)

For a while the plan was for me to write regular essays about my journey and adventures and I promptly wrote two of them. This, written ten or twelve years later, is the third. I was a lousy blogger.

But that was not why I created and maintain a personal Web site.

Thanks for visiting.

Maury

Maury Merkin
Last modified: Wed Mar 4 18:19:37 EST 2009