I am intrigued by my many friends and hangers on (don't ask, you know which category you are in…). I've noted in various topics in this blog before about how people perceive things so differently. I see examples around all over the place of two people drawing different conclusions from the same data.
Cliffdweller started in 1994 as my "Doer's Profile" at The 3DO Company. I had a new website and I needed something to put there. So I duplicated the completed questionnaire that 3DO handed out to new employees so everyone could get to know you faster. It had questions like "what's your favorite soda", "what's your favorite movie", "favorite fast food" etc. and that was supposed to work as an ice breaker for people who didn't know one another yet in a company that was born and then suddenly had 400 employees overnight. Then, since it was on the web and people all over the world could look at it, I altered it slightly, added some pictures, removed some personal info like phone numbers and in general polished it up a bit. That page is still buried here on Cliffdweller, if you know where to look (ok, here it is so you can be lazy and not go digging for it).
With the advent of the animated gif (imagine a time when there were no flashy-blinky things on a website!), I added the little spinning and splatting bald heads and the Mickey Mouse Club version of Bimbo's head.
I posted some photo sets here and there, using this tool and that tool. Finally, it just got too unwieldy. So I threw it out and replaced it all with one single picture of The Golden Gate Bridge. I did live in San Francisco, after all. And then gradually, the site began to grow again, eventually reaching the point where it sits today. To say there is a lot of content would be an understatement.
As you poke around the site (and you will poke around) you will notice different layouts and some evolution. Occasionally I go back and update a section to bring it into the current structure, but some things I just leave well enough alone. About 5 months ago, I finally fixed the movies so they have pages of their own to play on and so they would stream, but I will probably never update the New Zealand or the Area 51 photosets. By the time someone reads the whole blog, looks at all the pictures and watches all the movies, they will have downloaded more than 2GB from my server and pretty much rendered the rest of the afternoon useless.
The point is, it started as a single point of an idea and grew. a lot.
Take iTunes on my machine. About a year before iTunes came out, I whined to my business partner that I was tired of carrying CDs to work to listen to them and I thought there should be a better way to listen to the same music at home and at work. .mp3s were just beginning to make the rounds, so I purchased an MP3 encoder and started ripping songs. Still, my hard drives were all under 10GB so I had to be selective.
When iTunes appeared, I was happy. I was still carrying groups of CDs to work, but only to encode them and then take them home again. I carefully maintained my collection of ripped music and keyworded them and massaged them all into smart playlists. Over time I encoded a ton of music and all of it has specific information in the ID3 tags. I use smart playlists to organize my 7,000+ tunes and all of them live gracefully on my 60GB iPod.
At some point I even started showing what was playing in iTunes at any give time on the front page of Cliffdweller. (right now it's "Stairway to Heaven" by Dolly Parton). I should note that about half of the Cliffdweller's home page is generated from other stuff on the fly now. Stuff like this blog, the pdxmotw blog, and other little things. I even include recent album covers in the mouseover for recent tracks.
A friend of mine just got his first iPod and is going thru the "rip everything he owns" stage. He told me that he has it all mapped out where he can rip 5 CDs a night and be on target for a specific deadline he has set for himself. I can't imagine entering all of the personal meta-data that I have in my collection if I were ripping 5 CDs a night for a month or two.
My point here, again, is that it started as a single point and grew organically.
It's the same on the way I've configured my PowerBook. Whenever I upgrade Photoshop or BBEdit and manage to break all of the scripts/actions, it always takes some time to configure it back to be the way it was and then better than before. And it's not always possible to do it in one fell swoop. It's always an organic process that continues to evolve until the next upgrade where you start evolving again.
Over and over you see things that take time become very rewarding.
So let's learn from the lessons presented here today. Prove that we are capable and all that.
