The Internet has always fascinated me because of its size. One day there are this many sites and then the next there are this many more. The Internet today is one of the hottest resources for sharing and retrieving information. The great thing about the Internet is that you can access all of this information from your home or office, as opposed to going to the local library. The main thing that the Internet lacks that the library has is organization. The information is out there on the Internet, just the hard part is finding it. One could spend a whole day searching the net and still not find what they’re looking for. One reason for this is that most people get side-tracked when surfing the net and end up looking at something that is totally irrelevant. I’ve been surfing the net for about three years now and I’ve seen it grow exponentially. The World Wide Web for example was started in 1989. Now, it is the probably the most widely used source for information. Today you can find stores, books, magazines, newspapers, and more just by pointing and clicking with your mouse. So for my exhibition, I knew I wanted to do something with the net but didn’t know what. Eventually, I came up with the crazy idea of creating a page that would serve as a starting point on the net.

Brady and I chose to create this project in order to help others conduct research on the net. For many Internet newbies, finding information on the net can sometimes be a nightmare because of its vastness. Finding that critical starting point and working off of it are some of the difficulties faced by many. To help overcome some of these qualms, we have created a home page on the World Wide Web to aid students in their research needs. This is quite unique because it is centered around the Thacher curriculum. The page covers various aspects of History, English, Mathematics, the Sciences, the Arts, and the various languages taught at Thacher. Due to the vastness of the net, we could not go through and merely place every single sight we found on our page. To solve this problem, we went through a bunch of sites that were related to our work and evaluated its usefulness. The actual process of surfing the net was our research component. Many tedious hours were spent at looking at sites and reading some of the information that it contained. After gathering all of the sites that we were going to use, we had to assemble the page in a somewhat orderly fashion. We feel that this page will encourage the students to use the net more frequently for academic reasons.

The research aspect by far took the longest partly because of technical problems and other little minor details we ran into. The research was conducted by entering specific subjects into search engines such as Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), Webcrawler (http://webcrawler.com) Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com), and excite (http://www.excite.com) Taking the results from the various search engines, we then proceeded to the actual site of information and evaluated it. Sometimes the search engines would come up with the most bogus sites. For instance, I entered "European History" into one of the search engines. The results I had received were somewhat disappointing. It came back with "Fields of Study In History at Ohio State," "University of Pisa and the European Institutions," and so on. The point is that the search engine will return anything that contains the keyword that you enter. The search engine returned more than two hundred hits that contained the words "European" and "History." This often frustrates many because they feel that they are getting absolutely nothing done, which is true. The search engine often requires that you narrow your topic down. The topic of "European History" is just too broad. This problem we had to deal with because we were covering such a broad topic. We would go to each site and sometimes that site would contain other links to European History. We were constantly jumping from site to site to site. We sometimes followed thinks that eventually ended up to being dead links or nonexistent links. At first many speculated that we would just looking things up with a search engine and then just slap them down and call it a page. That is the exact opposite of what we did. If you look at the History page for example, we subdivided it into the different sections of history taught at Thacher, World History, US History, and European History. Latin American and Chinese History are included in the World History section. Again we did the same with the Sciences. We broke it up into Biology, Physics, and Chemistry. The sites on sciences were all over the place. Places that contained online demonstrations, virtual dissections, and more were among the more entertaining of them all.

Although this project started out fairly slow and smooth, we would occasionally run into minor problems. Improper syntax in our web documents were among the most common errors. Near the end of our researching, somewhere along our connection out to the Internet, MCI decided to replace a pipeline, which served as a major backbone to the net. When the two of us had finally received word that this was happening, we almost broke down and cried because we couldn’t complete our research efficiently. The net was virtually at a stand still for us for about two weeks. During those two weeks, researching was almost impossible. Though they were replacing the pipe, they didn’t take out the entire connection so we were able to do some work at very slow speeds. The ordinary home page that would come in after about ten seconds took about three minutes. During this whole ordeal, Jerry Holden, the school’s network consultant, kept us up to date on what progress was being made by MCI. We were almost to the point of abandoning the network and plugging in the good old fashioned modem.

Computer problems also plagued us. The Web Server that was running our project crashed on us. We were running Microsoft’s new Front Page Web Server under Windows 95 on my computer. It just happened that on one day it decided not to run properly anymore. This problem was easier to fix because all I had to do was erase the existing server, re-download the software and re-setup the server. This took a couple of days due to the major bottleneck on the network and due to the fact that MCI was still in the process of replacing their pipe.

The actual construction of the page wasn’t too hard for me because of past experiences with the World Wide Web. The main challenge of this page was organization. How did I want to lay this page out so that it would make some sense? I mean sure you can just slap all the information together and call it a page but it just doesn’t look right and sometimes doesn’t operate correctly. We had to lay it out so that it would actually be useful to the ordinary student to use. The actual language that the World Wide Web pages are written in is known as Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. HTML structures a document and provides a basic layout. The code would not really be considered a language because of its simplicity compared to other languages such as Pascal and C. HTML code only covers half of the aspect involved in the World Wide Web. The browser plays the other half. Browsers such as Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, and Microsoft Internet Explorer are responsible for determining the appearance of the document on a screen. The browser takes the HTML document, reads it, and determines where to put the text, how big the text should be, and so on. Graphics positioning is also set using HTML coding. HTML coding allows the web author to create tables, center objects, and add hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are words, phrases, or just a simple address that directs the user to another location that contains related information to the topic at hand. Graphics are often used to spice up a web page. Whether they are little pointers or big banners, any web page can benefit from graphics. One may have noticed that on the opening page we made use of several animated graphics. Graphics or pictures are often used in place of words or phrases in web pages.

This project was created for the Internet newbies to serve as a starting point on the World Wide Web. Instead of searching through the ordinary search engines, which can be a nightmare, they can browse through ours, which contains links to great sources of information. To help maintain this page, we hope that this project is continued in the years to come by other seniors expressing interest in the Internet.