Sharkey
Moderator: TMAX
-
Capttrips25
- Posts: 10
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 2:05 pm
- Location: Castlewood, Virginia
- Contact:
Sharkey
Hey Sharkey, when ya gonna feature my bus on your site? hehehehe.
Hey! No calling me out in my own forum!!!
Since you asked, here's more than you wanted to know. If you've spent much time on the site, then you know I never do anything the easy way. You can decide after reading it if you want to hate me forever.
Way back when I composed my first web page, coding the entire thing by hand, I had no purpose other than to have a subject while teaching myself the basics of HTML. When I needed an image to practice inserting graphics, I had to teach myself to use a scanner, *then* figure out how to put it into the page. The first version would fit on a floppy disk, and was hosted in my front shirt pocket so that I could plug it into friend's computers to view it.
In late 1996, the SYSOP at the local community free network provided me with a dial-up account that included 2Mb of disk space. I put up the pages I had created and added a few. The graphics were small because I was using .gif files, which didn't have compression. That and the fact that the dial-up connection was slow and took forever to load images onto the 640x480 screen that was the default resolution for 14" monitors of the time. 2Mb didn't go all that far.
Shortly thereafter, I moved much of the site (this wall all pre-mrsharkey.com domain) to sub directory on a server hosted for my employer's radio station. Although disk space wasn't a major issue any longer, the dial-up connection when away from work was. While in my office I had what we considered to be ripping fast service, 56 Frame Relay.
Originally, my idea was to scan the entire book Rolling Homes in order to get images of house trucks and buses, and to present the book, which was long out of print. Copyright fears put this to an end, but my friend Greg saved the concept by offering to allow me to scan and post many of the photos from his albums of trucks and buses. Files were saved as .jpg's to save disk space and bandwidth (I couldn't go hog wild with the disk space, as I was kind of piggy-backing my site on the radio station's account. At some point the host's server would begin to strain and I might get booted off.)
Out of the blue, I began to get emails from people who had viewed the pages, some of them from New Zealand, where housetrucks are still a popular means of alternative housing. When I asked how they had found me, I was told that my pages had some up during a search for "housetrucks". Obviously, the busy little search robots had found and cataloged my pages, and they were now being spread over the planet.
Back then, searching for "housetruck" would yield about four pages on Alta Vista, one from NZ called "New Year's Day Buzzwords" (I just searched, it's not out there anymore), a couple of pages about house moving, and my page. Obviously, I had the corner on something unique.
Early 1998, I designed a web site for a local computer store. They weren't very impressed with it, and decided to keep doing their own web pages (which I thought were exceedingly awful, but that was their problem.) Trying to decide how to salvage the many hours that I had into the design and concept resulted in using the template for my site, completely redesigned to what you see today.
December 1998, I registered the mrsharkey.com domain, and secured domain hosting on a server that was now owned by the former SYSOP for the old free community network. Gone were disk quotas, and at the time, bandwidth on the server was nil, and so was the traffic on the new domain. I began to add pages, scanning yet more from Greg's albums, and putting together book reviews that I thought were relevant.
From there, the site traffic grew, more pages were added, and you see the result on the site. As it is now, the site comprises over 25Mb in file size and weekly bandwidth is over 890Mb.
Through it all, I never made a specific decision as to what was or wasn't included on the site, that is no strict divisions, but I did know that I wanted the site to be housetruck and housebus specific. By house truck or bus, I mean vehicles that are substantially modified through roof raising, additions, new construction, etc, to be more like a small cottage or studio apartment than a "bus conversion". There were (and are) many bus conversion sites on the Internet. There were (and probably are) sites that specifically target school bus conversions. One of those (www.schoolbusconversions.com) promised to provide a welcome home to folks who were interested in bus living. I spent many hours in their chat room, discussing bus living and technology. Same with the Yahoo "Housetrucks" group. There were perhaps only two or three of us who were actual 'housetruckers", the great majority of members being owners of bus conversions.
None of this is meant to take anything away from bus conversions, those of others, or yours. It's just that given a finite amount resources, and wanting to focus on housetrucks and buses (as defined as a type), I chose to keep the site aimed in that direction. You've probably noticed that aside from the photos on the newspaper pages, and one in the review of Tom Wolfe's book, there are no images of Furthur on the site. Partially because I didn't have access to any that weren't property of Key-Z Productions, but also because I don't relate to that vehicle as a house bus, in spite of it's enormous historical impact upon the culture.
Oddly enough, the one bus conversion on the site, Von Dutch's GM Transit, is the most popular page of all, although I'm positive that this is more due to it's famous artist owner. That and the fact that I have some of the only photos in existence of it...
Narrowing the focus of the site in this manner has probably doomed the site to being more of a muesuem, since few, if any true house trucks or buses are being built these days.
Since your bus is depicted on a web page, and you have set up a gallery for Further East, you are more than welcome to post the addresses in the "WWW Links" section. I've also thought about adding a "User's Photos" Forum, where similar images could be posted.
Part of the reason for installing the forum was to give the site a more dynamic and fluid aspect. A place where community could happen without needing to meet any expectations, limits, or restrictions. It also helps that I don't have to sit for hours creating web pages, editing HTML by hand (yes, I still do some of it the hard way. WYSIWYG ain't necessarily What I See Is What I Want. Front Page has it's own ideas about formatting) and manipulating pixels in Photoshop to make navigation buttons and lighten/darken/crop/edit images. In essence, I'm attempting to turn a corner of the site over to the users to see if they can make something I can't. Give it a try.
Still friends?
Since you asked, here's more than you wanted to know. If you've spent much time on the site, then you know I never do anything the easy way. You can decide after reading it if you want to hate me forever.
Way back when I composed my first web page, coding the entire thing by hand, I had no purpose other than to have a subject while teaching myself the basics of HTML. When I needed an image to practice inserting graphics, I had to teach myself to use a scanner, *then* figure out how to put it into the page. The first version would fit on a floppy disk, and was hosted in my front shirt pocket so that I could plug it into friend's computers to view it.
In late 1996, the SYSOP at the local community free network provided me with a dial-up account that included 2Mb of disk space. I put up the pages I had created and added a few. The graphics were small because I was using .gif files, which didn't have compression. That and the fact that the dial-up connection was slow and took forever to load images onto the 640x480 screen that was the default resolution for 14" monitors of the time. 2Mb didn't go all that far.
Shortly thereafter, I moved much of the site (this wall all pre-mrsharkey.com domain) to sub directory on a server hosted for my employer's radio station. Although disk space wasn't a major issue any longer, the dial-up connection when away from work was. While in my office I had what we considered to be ripping fast service, 56 Frame Relay.
Originally, my idea was to scan the entire book Rolling Homes in order to get images of house trucks and buses, and to present the book, which was long out of print. Copyright fears put this to an end, but my friend Greg saved the concept by offering to allow me to scan and post many of the photos from his albums of trucks and buses. Files were saved as .jpg's to save disk space and bandwidth (I couldn't go hog wild with the disk space, as I was kind of piggy-backing my site on the radio station's account. At some point the host's server would begin to strain and I might get booted off.)
Out of the blue, I began to get emails from people who had viewed the pages, some of them from New Zealand, where housetrucks are still a popular means of alternative housing. When I asked how they had found me, I was told that my pages had some up during a search for "housetrucks". Obviously, the busy little search robots had found and cataloged my pages, and they were now being spread over the planet.
Back then, searching for "housetruck" would yield about four pages on Alta Vista, one from NZ called "New Year's Day Buzzwords" (I just searched, it's not out there anymore), a couple of pages about house moving, and my page. Obviously, I had the corner on something unique.
Early 1998, I designed a web site for a local computer store. They weren't very impressed with it, and decided to keep doing their own web pages (which I thought were exceedingly awful, but that was their problem.) Trying to decide how to salvage the many hours that I had into the design and concept resulted in using the template for my site, completely redesigned to what you see today.
December 1998, I registered the mrsharkey.com domain, and secured domain hosting on a server that was now owned by the former SYSOP for the old free community network. Gone were disk quotas, and at the time, bandwidth on the server was nil, and so was the traffic on the new domain. I began to add pages, scanning yet more from Greg's albums, and putting together book reviews that I thought were relevant.
From there, the site traffic grew, more pages were added, and you see the result on the site. As it is now, the site comprises over 25Mb in file size and weekly bandwidth is over 890Mb.
Through it all, I never made a specific decision as to what was or wasn't included on the site, that is no strict divisions, but I did know that I wanted the site to be housetruck and housebus specific. By house truck or bus, I mean vehicles that are substantially modified through roof raising, additions, new construction, etc, to be more like a small cottage or studio apartment than a "bus conversion". There were (and are) many bus conversion sites on the Internet. There were (and probably are) sites that specifically target school bus conversions. One of those (www.schoolbusconversions.com) promised to provide a welcome home to folks who were interested in bus living. I spent many hours in their chat room, discussing bus living and technology. Same with the Yahoo "Housetrucks" group. There were perhaps only two or three of us who were actual 'housetruckers", the great majority of members being owners of bus conversions.
None of this is meant to take anything away from bus conversions, those of others, or yours. It's just that given a finite amount resources, and wanting to focus on housetrucks and buses (as defined as a type), I chose to keep the site aimed in that direction. You've probably noticed that aside from the photos on the newspaper pages, and one in the review of Tom Wolfe's book, there are no images of Furthur on the site. Partially because I didn't have access to any that weren't property of Key-Z Productions, but also because I don't relate to that vehicle as a house bus, in spite of it's enormous historical impact upon the culture.
Oddly enough, the one bus conversion on the site, Von Dutch's GM Transit, is the most popular page of all, although I'm positive that this is more due to it's famous artist owner. That and the fact that I have some of the only photos in existence of it...
Narrowing the focus of the site in this manner has probably doomed the site to being more of a muesuem, since few, if any true house trucks or buses are being built these days.
Since your bus is depicted on a web page, and you have set up a gallery for Further East, you are more than welcome to post the addresses in the "WWW Links" section. I've also thought about adding a "User's Photos" Forum, where similar images could be posted.
Part of the reason for installing the forum was to give the site a more dynamic and fluid aspect. A place where community could happen without needing to meet any expectations, limits, or restrictions. It also helps that I don't have to sit for hours creating web pages, editing HTML by hand (yes, I still do some of it the hard way. WYSIWYG ain't necessarily What I See Is What I Want. Front Page has it's own ideas about formatting) and manipulating pixels in Photoshop to make navigation buttons and lighten/darken/crop/edit images. In essence, I'm attempting to turn a corner of the site over to the users to see if they can make something I can't. Give it a try.
Still friends?
-
Capttrips25
- Posts: 10
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 2:05 pm
- Location: Castlewood, Virginia
- Contact:
still friends
Yea, still friends. I wasn't calling you out, I was showing my respect for your site in my own weird way.
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Dennis The Bus Dweller
- Seasoned Nomadicista
- Posts: 1874
- Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 9:33 am
- Location: Southold N.Y.
- Contact:
The Ospray
Hi Sharkey
Did I read corectly that you are the owner of " The Ospray " on your site? What a great old rig. Are there any picture of the interior. Even in Roger's book there is only an exterior photo. I am going to raise my roof next spring/summer and really like how other have made use of that kind of space. I am going for a roof line something like the one's in Roders book on pages 14 of on lower page 71. Do you know who owned the bus on page 71 and are there any pic's laying around? There doesn't seem to be any photos of the interior in Rogers book on Rolling homes. Well, I hope all is good on your end.
Did I read corectly that you are the owner of " The Ospray " on your site? What a great old rig. Are there any picture of the interior. Even in Roger's book there is only an exterior photo. I am going to raise my roof next spring/summer and really like how other have made use of that kind of space. I am going for a roof line something like the one's in Roders book on pages 14 of on lower page 71. Do you know who owned the bus on page 71 and are there any pic's laying around? There doesn't seem to be any photos of the interior in Rogers book on Rolling homes. Well, I hope all is good on your end.
Peace along the way
Dennis the bus dweller N.Y.
Dennis the bus dweller N.Y.
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