About Smallhouse

Smallhouse is the somewhat fragmented online representation of one individual. It is a private website -in terms of ownership and maintainence, if not of availability- and does not attempt to provide any services to anyone save the proprieter, but he would be pleased if you enjoyed it nevertheless.

This website has existed in seven other formats at three other servers in the past. It began as a fansite for a softdrink called "Fanta", specifically the orange flavor. You may have heard of it. This version was built on a "fill in the blanks and create your own website" type of server, far less advanced than those of the same variety currently available. The website was at that time little more than a few short quirky sentences, an image of Fanta cans, and links to other pages, but in those days, it was all about the novelty of the thing. It then existed as "Lunatic's Cove" on Angelfire, server/webtool amalgam which has since gone downhill, but at the time, it served to provide more flexibility and space. LC was a hypercard-esque layout, heavy on text, and betrayed the author's then fairly recent introduction to HTML.

It was only after this that the website began to take the shape it has continued to grow into. The third edition, called "The Realm of the Banana", was the first format to be more than an obtuse hodge-podge of material and links. RotB was orderly, colourful, and it was there that first appeared, in the form of an update notice page, what has since become a full-on blog. Other new features of the site included a section for poetry, another for links, and a third-party guestbook.

After some time, a friend of the author and fellow Angelfire denizen, one Zarya, who had herself left Angelfire some time before, invited the website to be hosted on the domain she had purchased, exitseraphim.org. Of course, the offer was accepted. Soon the expanding knowledge on the part of the author led to the creation of the "Cruise Uncontrolled" layout, stylized after an automobile dashboard. Though this layout was much cleaner and more technically advanced than previously, the author is not a car person, and eventually the CU layout became immensly uninspiring, and was replaced once more by a text-heavy layout. This new layout was called Smallhouse.

In time, the text-adventure tone of this version proved cumbersome and unsatisfactory, and the website entered a transitory period wherein it had the appearance of CU, but not the spirit. At long last, it emerged in a new form. It retained the name Smallhouse, however, as it evoked the sort of cozy, homespun image the author wished to present. This was by far the longest-running form of the website, with only occaisional cosmetic or structuraly changes that left the ovarching form consistent. After a few years, it was decided that the time had arrived to locate Smallhouse on its own server with its own domain. As all the commonest iterations of "Smallhouse" were already registered, "3feetofftheedge", the name of the directory in which the website had resided both at Angelfire and ES.org, was quickly claimed, and continues to serve as the address at which all this madness can be found.

PHP, an interest in web standards, reader-submitted comments, and an RSS feed all came into play in the years after the move. As the author came to learn more about advanced web design, he strove to make Smallhouse more accessible, error-free, and in general quite shiny. While teaching a class on Web Design for a summer school program, he began to sketch out plans for a new layout, built up from scratch, inspired by a demo page he had whipped up as an example and sandlot for his students. This design incorporated elements of the incumbent format as well as some of the well-ordered sensibilities of RotB. It is this design which has guided the website you now observe. The proprieter hopes you find it pleasing.

It is worth noting that this website, ever since its unshackling from Angelfire, had always been made entirely in a text editor. This is invariably both the most sensible and the most honorable option for any web designer.