History of the Unofficial
Uncomfortable [] Spaces
Web Site

[about]   [listings]   [history]   [license]   [design]

The Unofficial Uncomfortable Spaces Website, originally representing the generation of Uncomfortable Spaces galleries in Chicago, has since 1999 represented a handfull of other gallery falling under a nomenclature like "stray" or "alternative" even if they are neither. This page presents some of the yearly histories .. which are definitely more interesting during early years of web anachy. In historical order. Answers to an early email [information request] for a Master's Thesis is listed at the end. (Updated 2 Jan 2004)

[1996] [1997] [1998] [1999] [2000] [2001] [2002] [2003] [2004 - 2008] [2009] [2010] [intent]

History for 1996

I started this site up in about April of 1996, as an excuse to have an online catalogue for the exhibition "NO CARRIER" which was presented in September 1996 at Beret International Gallery in Chicago (now at [my own]) website. My motto was "it has got to be free," and thus this is a tale of various schemes and relocations, all with the purpose of keeping the web site free.

I am immensly indebted to a bunch of CS students at UIUC (including one of mine) who supported this venture in 1997 and into 1998, with access and disk space, as well as alliases, rerouting, and whatever else was required to keep it going.

I initially set up at Shienar.Blight.Com, a machine run by Nick Avos from the back of a restaurant in Chicago. I started in March of 1996 with a test-and-development site for the on-line catalog. By September it was ready, and the site was announced. From the September opening file hits came in at about 50 to 60 per day.

In the fall of 1996 I converted the site from an exhibition catalog to a posting of show opening at the Uncomfortable Spaces galleries, and started to collect the work of their artist, and reviews of the Spaces galleries. After December 1996 domains started to log in from further afield. A total of about 3500 files were served to the end of the year.

History for 1997

Blight closed January 3, 1997, when Nick and his family moved. The computer Shienar was moved to Urbana, Illinois, and sat under Kees' desk for two years, until someone dropped it off at my house in September of 1998, where it is now a terminal to the LAN.

On January 28, 1997, I reopened again at Lucien.Blight.com, which was actually Mike Doubek's machine, run from a dorm room at UIUC. But soon the web site moved again, for various reasons (like avoiding UIUC admins), and operated under a succession of names like Arh.bla.bla.urh.uiuc.edu and others, first when Mike was forced to drop the blight.com alias, and then when the University dropped back to an old backup file. Argh! I have nothing to do with UIUC, by the way.

The U of I, meanwhile, had been kept at bay by making the Lucien web sites transparent to all University admin domains, "There ain't no web sites here."

Notices of this change of address went out, as a Uncomfortable Spaces postcard exhibition enclosure, and as junk email, on March 24th 1997.

Then on May 14 "Arh...uiuc.edu" closed when everybody abandoned school for summer vacation, and I had to move all the files to the library server at Columbia College in Chicago, and the address changed to "www.colum.edu/~etc" This seemed to have been accomplished without their awareness, but also without my awareness that there were injunctions against unofficial websites.

On May 20 we re-appeared (semi-officially) on a site called Dreamer, again behind a UIUC server. Confident of some longevity, on July 9 I removed all but the index file and its IMG resources from Columbia.

But on August 4 this clandestine operation was tracked down by suits, for reasons having nothing to do with the website, and Dreamer closed connections to its unofficial websites. So on August 10 I moved all the files except a few back to Colum.edu again. Late in August Columbia was registering 55 hits per day, and reached 17000 on August 30.

At the beginning of September, 1997, I moved the website again, this time to Cpoint.net, our current and permanent site, again in Champaign, but with no official connections to the University. Instead the connection is with a site owned by the same half dozen hackers who rolled on the ground with laughter at the opening of NO CARRIER at Beret Gallery in September of 96 when they discovered the piece "Oh Shit, It's a MAC."

The Spaces website was the first client of their Counterpoint Networking Inc, and the prime beta test object for system administration as a result. They developed some really smooth email facilities, aliasing, and file management as a result, perhaps, of my constant bitchings.

At Cpoint.net we started getting 400 file-hits per day during the first week of September -- maybe because I managed to get another notice out with the regular Uncomfortable Spaces mailing. By mid November the total number of file hits had doubled to 34,000 since September.

On December 10, 1997, we reached 40,000 file hits at Cpoint.net, and the web files at Columbia were reduced to a refresh forwarding address. The total to the end of the year ran 47,240 hits.

Meanwhile -- on September 6 -- the librarians at Colum.edu locked my account for three weeks for running ssh on their system. I ended up connecting through three other university accounts elsewhere in Chicago in order to maintain the web pages.

Columbia also never noticed that ssh had been compiled on *their* system ("local compilation prohibited"), that for three years I had been bypassing their login_for_idiots menu ("must use login menu"), nor did they notice the web pages ("web pages prohibited"), which remained accessible to browsers despite my lockout, although orphaned, for I couldn't make any changes without a login account. Of course the admin at Columbia has 300 years of his family's genealogy posted as web pages.

Over the next six months, Columbia dropped ftp, nn, and telnet services, and eventually discontinued all of their dialup service "for matters of security." (!)

History for 1998

By the end of January we reached 60,000 file hits, and I decided to throw good money after bad: we listed "spaces.org" with Internic.

And on April 15 we reached 100,000 file hits. Holy smokes!

In May I OCR'd the caca newsletter, and placed it on the web, and obtaining from Counterpoint the use of "caca.spaces.org" in return for a donated USP. But the shit hit the fan when it initially went up, and various Chicago art critics demanded to have their texts and names removed. After six months of design efforts, they finally opened thier own website (Today at [http://www.chicagoartcriticsassociation.org]).

In June Counterpoint pressed a CD-ROM which includes the spaces site, the [Aesthetic Investigation] site at Blight.com, and lots of other stuff.

In September Cpoint.net relocated to Chicago, and for the first time no address change notice were required. The change-over in location happened in one hour's time.

Meanwhile two additional locations were attached, a site used by the Senior Home Care Cooperative, [care.spaces.org], and a directory used by ex-TA's from Columbia, "spaces.org/org", since moved to [my site] and now including work of students and ex-students.

A subdirectory was added which allowed refreshing directly to the weekly recompilation of Reader art listings. The latter is updated automatically with a Perl script which checks to see when the Reader updates their art listings files on the web (at that time at Yahoo), and then sorts out the openings and reorganizes everything alphabetically. This has been running since September of 1998, and is the second most frequently visited page.

The most frequently visited page is the chicago file, an annual compilation and review of art related web sites in Chicago.

By the end of the year we reached 257,805 file hits.

History for 1999

The Uncomfortable Spaces coalition started to come apart in the fall of 1998, as the owners married, divorced, and moved. At this point the web pages represent only two galleries, and I started seriously thinking of opening it up for some second generation spaces and fly-by-night galleries.

In the Fall of 1998 the three galleries no longer opened on the same dates, although the postcard mailings still went out in a single envelop. In the Spring of 1999, Rich Kelly closed Tough gallery, and Joel Lieb grumbled about landlords, and threatened to move to New York City, and in June of 1999 he did so.

That left only Ned's Beret International gallery after the Summer of 1999. I opened the web site up to other exhibition spaces-- sort of like the second generation of galleries of the ilk and inclination of the original Uncomfortable Spaces Galleries, and basically took any that were interested.

Understand that I have no obligation to the Uncomfortable Spaces galleries, or any of the other galleries now listed. I just liked the idea, and had free web space available. Changing the index page every month is no big deal, nor is the construction of separate pages for galleries. Getting the cooperation of the Uncomfortable Spaces galleries, however, had been like pulling teeth. The "reviews" page -- which was forever behind -- attests to that.

In January the publisher of the Reader contacted me, via a "whoever is stealing our web pages" e-mail. I called her, praised the Reader for its content, its reviews, and its listings (who in Chicago looks at anything else?) and we agreed that I could continue at a reduced scale, and if links were available back to the Reader pages at Yahoo. Which I did -- I reduced the listings to only show openings and receptions. The links back were always there, mostly because the verbage of the Reader listings are trimmed to 40 words or so, followed by a link back to their page -- "For more see {URL}".

Meanwhile, our file hits have increased every year. In 1996: 3500 files served, in 1997: 47,000 files, in 1998: 210,000 files. At the end of 1999: 450,000.

Early next year I get as part of an e-mail from Adam Mikos, the following..

Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 18:06:38 -0500
From: Adam Mikos
To: Jno Cook
Subject: Re: photos

I went to a CACA discussion, I guess you would call it that, on Saturday at Jan cicero. Among all the bs and posturing and pedigreeing, and Bulkas black leather shoes with holey tube socks, your name came up a few times. Someone asked the incredibly predictable question of the web and arts place in it. Bulka started talking about the spaces site then another caca critic said a few words about it too. All were feeling very smart talking about your web sites.

Report for 2000

(October/November 2000) I moved the reviews page, the artists page, and all the pages referring to the Uncomfortable Spaces galleries to a subdirectory "archives." Beret closed in the Spring of 2000, the space has subsequently been occupied by another gallery.

Meanwhile a number of galleries use this site to make announcements, including Law Office, Bodybuilder and Sportsman, Suitable Gallery, Temporary Services, Dogmatic Gallery, Standard Gallery, Trauma Space, Joymore Gallery, Gravy Magazine, FGA Magazine, and occassional others, including spaces in Milwaukee, NYC, and Japan. Some only appear once, or have only one exhibit per year, other are more regular. We featured the Department of Cultural Affairs during November ("Artists Month" in Chicago, they say). Won't do that again.

Many of the galleries have their own web sites, but spaces.org seems to be a sort of bus depot where people check in and hang out some. Temporary Service claims that over half their site hits come from the spaces.org site.

In September we added the domain ChicagoArt.Net, with money from the IAC, administration by Gallery 312, and programming skills of Counterpoint Networking Inc. Some 60 different PHP files are delivered and written on the fly, while making database inquiries, by the Apache server at Blight.com. See [http://chicagoart.net/].

At the beginning of December chicagoart.net had some 1200 users. Those numbers probably represent the fact that only about 1000 people populate all the gallery openings in Chicago.

Some 40 galleries and organizations enrolled with "Exhibitor" accounts. About 40 announcements were sent out since we opened on September 20. That is 24,000 e-mails.

Meanwhile, at Spaces.org, the Chicago Page remains as the most popular, even though I didn't update after an initial (3 month long) rewrite. The number of galleries with web sites increased dramatically by January of 2000, so a lot of work (and a lot of disorganization) was involved.

The Chicago Page gets an occasional accolade, and once in a while the response of a totally disgruntled viewer. Perhaps irony is not understood by those against who it is directed. A sample follows...

Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2000 16:54:50 -0000
From: K....
To: .. spaces.org
Subject: huh?

I am truly confused by the point of your site. You title your site "Chicago's Art on the Web" and describe it as an annotated listing of links to galleries, etc.

That is clearly NOT what your site is about. You describe very few sites in terms of their content, and you edit your list according to your own taste (saying that the college sites "just plain suck"), which is your prerogative of course, but not useful to anyone but you. I'm interested in what kind of art they show, not whether their site uses frames or has white backgrounds.

You do try to evaluate these sites in terms of usability, but fail. Rather, you list the things that you find fault with personally. How can you critisize these sites so harshly and unprofessionally when your site has so many problems? For example: distracting animations, poor information architecture, poor graphic design, one LONG page, and typos, just to name a few.

It's a shame that the only thing your site is useful for is the links to other sites.

And then there are these occasional emails...

Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 01:02:23 -0500
From: nao...
To: .. spaces.org
Subject:

you rock.

n

I reinstituted the scamming of Reader art openings and receptions again in August. The Reader dropped Yahoo in Spring and started listing art on their own site, as a single file. I had to rewrite all of the Perl script. They are now updating their files very late Thursday night, so they become available by Friday morning. See the [openings] page.

Things still change weekly at the Reader art listings file, so every week I need to see what dumb things I have to substitute globally. At first it was the MAC 8-bit dashes and paragraph cyphers which passed unfiltered. Lately it has been name anchors without closing tags. Fetching, processing, extracting, and sorting the reader file and rewriting it for spaces.org is now down to 2 seconds, thanks to a dual pentium box (not mine) and a commercial DSL line.

The Spaces.org site accumulated 781,000 file hits by the end of December. With an average of 25 to 30 images and icons on the index page at any one time, this translates roughly to 20,000 to 30,000 individual logins (we dont track domains).

An "FGA" archive was added to the "Rants" collection.

We dropped all of the CACA files, but have a cached set (off line) for historical purposes.

Early in December I received an email from Temporary Services, with an the following added note..

Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 07:50:08 -0500
From: Marc Fischer
Subject: New Temp Server

P.S. In a talk/discussion we participated in at the Cultural Center, the organizer Mary Murphy (former Randolph St. Gallery person) made many great proclomations with regard to the work you do in keeping Spaces.org together as a resource. We could only second the notion. Part of the discussion centered around what people can do to patronize the arts without necessarily entering into the usual buyer of objects/seller of objects relationship. We discussed that one way people can help is to freely lend property, services, or technology that they own or have access to, to enable artists to put on shows and execute ideas. I was quick to mention that you are working with donated webspace, which is a beautiful thing.

Report for 2001

(December 2001) Looks like we did about 880,000 file hits in 2001, up only a little from 2000 - which may be due to the loss of service in April of 2001 (see below).

ChicagoArt.Net has grown to an unexpected 110 galleries, 1900 patrons, has sent over 500 announcements, for a total of over 1,000,000 e-mails since September 2000.

(April) Temporarily removed the folyamat, archives, wada, uturn, and org directories on the loss of the business DSL line when Northpoint went under. Counterpoint Networking (and Blight.com) operated from a single modem for a few days, then two modems.

A T-1 line came in June. With that, "free" is at an end. Well, for me.

Report for 2002

(update of January 2003) [Gravy] and Rants have been inactive, FGA managed to archive only one issue (April), Shuko Wada is in Europe, and I have not updated the Chicago Page in two years. Still managed nearly a million file hits (928,816) this year. I will get back to the Chicago page this spring. Meanwhile the "Org" subdirectory was moved to another [location] in September.

[ChicagoArt.Net] started billing for services, to the great chagrin of a number of exhibitors, although unnoticed by some 30 disappeared spaces. The stalwart survivors count to 73. At year end 623 Announcements had been sent (2002), to a list of 2300 subscribers, representing 2,500,000 emails to date.

We started an [archive of openings] late in January.

In May we started serving Keri Butler's FYI weekly broadcast of shows from a procmail script at Spaces. In July we started up a temporary listserv for an invasion of Hammond Indiana.

In December we typed some 700 lines of procmail and sed script to act as a noncommercial listserv substitute for the 70 member [Other Group] group, which has been active at Topica for the last three years. [This has been discontinued in 2008, but there is a local archive. Othergroup was converted to my discussion of pros and cons of alternate cosmologies.]

Not much else..

Report for 2003

In Spring a domain name I had owned for a year or so anyway, [ChicagoArt.ORG], was activated as a searchable database. It is actually a flatfile, but will produce very quick results.

In June a Wiki open database was added to ORG, which allows anyone to post notices. [and dropped July 2004 after being spammed]

In December of 2003 we left Counterpoint Networking in Chicago behind, and moved everything to a virtual server in California, administered from Oregon and Illinois. Such is the internet.

We moved Spaces.org, Othergroup.net, ChicagoArt.ORG, GravyMagazine.com, Care.Spaces.org, and Muralart.org. For the move most of the Spaces.org archives were taken off line. We will get them back on line soon, since there are still constant request from bots.

Spaces.org tallied 1,024,447 file hits during the year, up slightly from the year before (4,324,706 since 96).

ChicagoArt.Net (still located at Blight.com) produced its 5,000,000th email sent to some 3200 people. Bounces are now handled automagically.

OtherGroup.Net posted 14,000 lines of verbosities (and logged 42,000 file hits from curious onlookers).

Report for 2004 - 2008

Five years, and I have been busy elsewhere. The box is now in Texas.

Othergroup has not posted anything in two years -- ever since the topics of religion and politics were opened. I will move the database of messages to the archive at 'chicagoart.org' with access from 'spaces.org' -- soon. Then I intend to turn othergroup over to the topic of speculative cosmology.

The Reader was also sold to some other outfit in 2007, and changed format and content of the newsprint version. In August 2008 they went cute with the posting of art openings, so I dropped it from the spaces.org index page. Originally written as a Perl script in 1998, constant changes in format forced my to redo it as a Sed script late in 2007. I will substitute the ChicagoArt.Net weekly calendar page instead.

Report for 2009

Absolutely nothing happened in 2009. I was busy researching and writing a 650,000 word essay on an alternative cosmology (at [http://saturniancosmology.org]), as I had, in fact, been busy with since late 2001. Almost done.

Report for 2010

In April I received a request to list an exhibition. With that I am starting things up again. I added an iframe for the weekly listings at ChicagoArt.Net. The file hits last year dropped to 300,000 from an earlier 3,000,000.

The Intent for this Website

I received an email survey questionnaire in May of 1997, from one Shane-Juls, doing data collection for a thesis at SAIC in Chicago. The questions and answers are listed below. The quoted text is in italics, the responses are offset. Some corrections added. Never did find out the results of her survey. But the sentiment stands.

From Shanejuls Fri May 30 22:08:03 1997
Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 21:36:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Shanejuls * aol.com
To: jno.cook * dns.colum.edu
Subject: we met at Beret, student doing gallery/internet survey, remember?

[The following text is in the "unknown-8bit" character set]
[Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
[Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]

Ah, also your big sale of the day - $15. So your web site if most impressive, especially considering the owners of the uncomfy spaces aren't exactly "aware". So in some ways that shatters my study because as you will see from my questions for everyone, I made some assumptions. I don't think that your site being called "unofficial" counts here, because you said they are aware and are fine if not appreciative of your efforts, which makes the site representative of the spaces. However, I will have to think about it more.

The "Unofficial" comes from a long line of similar appellations, as with fan-zines, and currently with Web sites dedicated to the adoration of some media figure. It's a way for adoring fans to not implicate their heroes as self-serving, and also it takes the authors off the hook with respect to accuracy, etc. I'm thinking of adding a link to an "Unofficial Kim Ambriz Rock Girl Web Site" page also, just for kicks, to drive that point home. And a page deprecating the use of mice ("Say No To Rodents!").

So thank you in advance for taking the time to reply to these questions, feel free to cut and paste them and e-mail them back.

Your response will be used in the study only as anonymous.

Please note the following guidelines:

etc...

1. What is the main purpose of your web-site?

At first to have *my own* catalog ( ../sep.htm, ../sep2.htm, ../sep3.htm, ) up for an exhibition (September 1996). Since the exhibit dealt with computers and the internet, an on-line catalog seemed appropriate. So I learned HTML code (that takes about two hours), and started something up on a machine running out of the back room at a restaurant in Chicago. The box belonged to a friend of one of my kids (he and his friends are all CS majors), and ran off a T1 line to the net.

But I needed an excuse to keep the page up for more than the duration of the exhibition. The solution was to create a site for the galleries, and to invite other artists to put things up. Started that up in September also. That way I would be only *one* of a number of "artists files." And any promotion of the US galleries still promotes *my* work.

Additionally I have been very impressed by these galleries: they have generated more reviews than most of the other galleries in Chicago put together. I wanted to document this. The galleries themselves have only spotty records of all that has been written about them. They just don't have the time, and they tend to localize their attention to current matters, rather than the past.

I am convinced that the US galleries represent a phenomenon in Chicago which will be looked back on in future years as being significant. So I will be the historian. I take a portable puter every once in a while to the galleries and just rummage through their reviews, check them against what I have, and add more to my listing. And I try to get other artists to get slides, resumes and stuff to me. This last is not easy.

Lastly, I wanted a "model" web site. I have seen enough dumb, badly coded, slow, and boring sites that I wanted to do better. So the website is also a soapbox for Web Page design (../ubcpage.htm), and additionally a place I can sound off about Stupid Sites (chicago.htm), or whatever (oak.htm). I can afford to sound off because I don't really care what people in art in Chicago think of me. I have thus nothing to lose from their ill will.

Ok, the goals.. Let me list them:
- promote my exhibition with a catalog
- promote the US galleries
- start a visual and verbal history of the galleries
- comment on the yukky state of Chicago's internet art
- show what a fast, compact, and downward compatible site can do.

2. Does it accomplish that?

It works. I think. Except for the last goal listed above, the other items represent the main four divisions of the web site. Each is growing and being augmented slowly, and organized as clearly and compactly as I can imagine.

I get very little feedback, but when I do it is favorable. Much of it initially from CS people at UIUC (I have *no* official connection with UIUC, by the way). And yours. And repeated hits from some domains, including no, fi, de, uk, il, fr, nl, pl.

3. What factors prompted you to create a web page?

Above

4. Was your site set up in house or did you use an outside service?

Totally "in house" - an idiot can learn the basic HTML code snippets in half an hour. It probably takes a little longer to find out how to lay things out properly, how to navigate Unix boxes, how to query log files, negotiate with a server, what other utilities you might need to write to keep track of things, what kind of things to avoid... All this is technical or aesthetic. The real effort is still presentation of content.

5. What service did you use and why?

Not applicable. I don't recommend using a browser-specific html coder (you can hire high school kids to run those). I suggest hand-coding by someone who knows what they are doing, and is aware of what actually happens with browsers and in the transfer of files.

There is a collection of total screwups on the Web someplace. Screwups by Netscape and MS!

Columbia College starts their page with what looks like an ad for Coffee, nothing else on their index page is comprehensible if you log in with a text browser. Typical of another asshole thinking things will look to a viewer as they look to him on *his* screen.

So the "services" are finger, Qedit, Awk, Gsar, plus some DOS and Unix scripts to move things around, ftp, telnet, etc. The code gets tested locally with Netscape, Bobcat (Lynx), Slipknot, Netroad, Knots.

6. What have the monetary costs been to set it up, run, and maintain it?

Ok, I spent $8 twice for xeroxes. If it ain't free I ain't gonna do it.

Otherwise: none. Just time. A few minutes to an hour every night the first few months. All it takes now is the time to rewrite the exhibition listing (the index file), which happen every 6 weeks. And when I get to it, updates of the Reviews. And once in a while, when I convince another artist to supply images and text, to put up another page.

What takes time is checking the list of Chicago Web connections. I realize I haven't the time to keep up with it, so I am changing the "Chicago" page to a Semi-annual Review of Sites. That way I am only obligated to look at it once every 6 months.

7. How old is your site and how many hits per day do you average?

About April of 1996 - thus about 13 months [in May 1997]. Hits per month (file hits) ran about 300 a year ago before it was announced, and moved up to 1500 per month in late 1996, then bombed when we lost the dedicated line in January and we moved through 4 locations at UIUC.

In May 97 we set up behind a server in a protected location, also at UIUC (dreamer.isdn.etc). By September I'll probably get behind an ISDN line of a consulting firm. Maybe by that time I will register the site as an alias (Spaces.com is taken already, but Spaces.org is not). File hits to date [May 1997] count about 13000.

8. How do you advertise your web site? Are you linked to other sites?

September 1996: inclusion of the URL on the exhibition invitation (2000). An independent mailing once, of 200 people on *my* mailing list.

March 1997: a card included with a gallery mailing (1600 cards). Will do that again in September.

Handouts at the gallery doors.

Twice since March with a a mass eMail spamming; from lists of any artists stupid enough to have included a CC list with some AOL "Happy Time Virus" chain letter. The galleries have not yet placed the URL on their cards. One is thinking about it.

I also listed (Fall of 1997) with Submitit (probably 6 listing services), and specifically with Yahoo. We have been hit a couple of times by robots independently. I know that from the domain listing which I generate when I do a log file grep. Since we changed locations 4 times this Spring, I have not relisted.

9. What segment of your market is using the Internet site?

Wah! The intended audience are artists and older adult gallery goers and collectors. The Artists are mostly braindead when it comes to the internet. The older folks will never in their live find the time to learn. And they don't care. The audience is among younger kids, now in college and in High School, some no doubt artist, but who knows. Who browses the Web anyway?

I am considering offering an "announce" eMail service which would allow sending eMail spam during the week before an opening. Given a list of eMail addresses, I can generate a Unix script to send an announcement in a few minutes.

The last "We Moved Again" spamming went out without a hitch, with individual eMail pieces send at four second intervals. Previous versions tended to kill the Unix mail deamon and overrun the outgoing mail spooler.

But the gallery crowd needs to get better connected (to the internet), and there has to be more of an active interest from the galleries. This might come about when they start listing the URL on their invitations. I would not expect anything before September.. Rich Kelly (Tough gallery) has mentioned it, but only because he just bought a computer and opened a free AOHell account. We'll see..

10. Have there been any direct links between the web page and sales?

Not my purpose.

11. Overall, do you feel the web site has been monetarily profitable?

Loser.. Just takes time. It is driven by pride and craft and a sense of history. It is a *document* -- not a promotion.

12. Besides generating sales, what else has your site accomplished?

Not even angry comments! I expected it to be a source for critical analysis and information: But in reviews of *my* exhibition the Web site (as a resource) has been either totally misread or left unused. The New Art Examiner was going to download an image for a review (by somebody who never woke up from his High School English class). I checked: they did dl some files, but I suspect they had no clue on what to do next; they ended up reproducing the invitation postcard instead (It is masked different from the web site image).

This is really strange for a magazine. At the other extreme of technology, the invitation postcard *never* existed as an actual image. It is a screen capture of a Usenet image sent in 24 bit form to a 12 bit file viewer, was sent as an eMail attachment to the person doing the postcard graphics, who tweaked it a little (CMGY) and sent it as eMail to the color printer in Texas. It came back from Texas as a *real* postcard.

13. How do you rate the success of your web page?
Very Successful
Somewhat Successful
Fairly Unsuccessful
Very Unsuccessful

I am tempted to answer: I don't really care.. But I do. But without direct responses like sales it is virtually impossible to tell. A significant analysis would be to find the time between closely spaced file hits from the same domain on the same day. That gives you some idea of how long people look at an individual file before retrieving the next one, and how deeply they read into the site tree. I have done some looking at which files get looked at, but no analysis of time.

Please explain why you rated it so.

Please feel free to add any additional comments you may have which may be relevant in anyway.

Well.. There's comments everywhere. Good luck. What is this for?

Thank you so much for helping me out, and I am on a quest to find lost appliances and help them find their way home.

Cool!

CULater/jno .. and of course your eMail address will be added to the "announce" list.

[] The Uncomfortable Spaces Website, [www.spaces.org]
Site Host: Outflux Net
URL: http://spaces.org/history.htm