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This is a very old web site. The first pages went up in early 1995 and
were hosted at the U of MN health informatics web server. Sometime in the 90s I acquired
my last name as a domain, and faughnan.com has continued in more or less its current form
since then.
Technologies change, and my world has changed too. I write much more now
than when these pages were actively edited -- but it's all under various pseudonyms. My
writing is all respectable stuff, but when corporate meetings start by googling
participants someone named "faughnan" is advised to keep political opinions,
family priorities and unadulterated geekery offstage. If you want to know where I write
now, you can email me at jfaughnan@spamcop.net.
Even as I write elsewhere, this site is pretty static. I would love to do
more updates, and I've some ideas on how to make that more possible. In particular I'm
looking at moving some of my most popular old pages (ie bike touring) to companion Google
Apps (sites.faughnan.com and docs.faughnan.com) so I can edit from any workstation.
My recent migration to DreamHost
makes it easy for me to insert appropriate redirects, so I can migrate without breaking
links.
Most of this site was written in Microsoft
FrontPage 98, using a Template Page. I use some simple
style sheets and metadata tags, though I think those are pretty obsolete now (spammers
misused them). There's nothing quite like FP 98 today -- the world of web authoring split
into blogs, community sites, and professional data driven sites.
- 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.
- Snippets (a failed effort, but weblogs
do something similar and I may try one of those instead)
- 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
Author: John G. Faughnan. The
views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. Pages are
updated on an irregular schedule; suggestions/fixes are welcome but they may take weeks to
years to be incorporated. Anyone may freely link to anything on this site
and print any page; no permission is needed for citing, linking, printing, or
distributing printed copies.