Caveat: Venter

Think about all of the things that make your brain itch. These are mine.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Squatters and Pronouns and History (Oh My!)

I posted quite some time ago that I was looking into getting the domain "wherewereyouwhen.com" for a site I planned to create. A company that seems to buy up lots of domains in order to squat for profit had purchased that name, so rather than suffer the time and expense of getting it that way, I changed the name by using "we" in place of "you."

I am not yet set up for hosting, but that is not an issue since I have yet to finish my dummy pages for testing navigation. Once I have the basic navigation down, I will see if I can scrounge up some coders to help with the back end (probably PHP, but could be PERL) and a few other things (this type of navigation, for instance, is great in Flash, but that does not make it easy to set up an alternate site for text-based and accessible browsers).

The basic premise is simple enough: History, with a capital "H," is easy to find in books and online, but it is not how we know it. I am interested in history with a little "h": those small, personal recollections of important moments. Obvious ones for my generation are the explosion of th Challenger (almost single-handedly responsible for my wanting to create this site) and 9/11 (which is more recent than this concept). I have others: the San Francisco earthquake during the World Series, the opening moments of Operation Desert Storm, the moment Nelson Mandela walked out of prison.

Each of these moments comes back to me, stands as a marker in my life that anchors other memories around it. I want to let everyone share those recollections in one place, but to do it, I need talented people who will donate their time and skills. That's right, this is a zero-profit concept, so all work will have to be volunteer. Any takers?