The virtual attic.(THE STRAGGLER)(website administration)

My attic, like yours, is a place of dust and dark corners, exposed brickwork and beams, and piled boxes and bundles of forgotten or little-used items: luggage, old magazines, out-of-favor toys, medical mementoes from long-ago mishaps (did I really go round on crutches for three months?), and what department stores call "seasonals"--Christmas decorations and the like. Much of it will be stock for our next garage sale, but there are also a few boxes that are neither "seasonal" nor garage-saleable, and which nag feebly at the conscience when spotted. Now I think I have come up with ... but let me begin at the beginning.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is my occasional pleasure--I am speaking of three or four hours a week--to fiddle with my computer. I don't mean mechanically. I don't know one end of a soldering iron from the other. This is software fiddling--getting the computer to do things for me. I made my living for some years as a computer programmer, back in the days of "big iron"--the million-dollar mainframe computers that took up entire floors of corporate premises before desktops, laptops, handhelds, and the Internet arrived like that meteor that saw off the dinosaurs. I still like to do a little coding now and then, though for amusement only, and perhaps to reassure myself that the computer is still my servant, not my master.

Software fiddling nowadays means making things for the Internet. Using mark-up languages, you create web pages for your computer to display. Using a "front-end" language, you instruct the displaying computer to manipulate the displayed information. Using a different, "server-side" language, you instruct the distant server, where all pages are permanently kept, to save, search, and retrieve information. It's fun.

Well, I have my own website, which I started back in the late 1990s, when the Internet was still new, at any rate to the general public. Still trapped in that "big iron," IBM-or-nothing mentality, I bought my site-building tools from the biggest, bossiest firm around, which was of course Microsoft Corp. They had a product named FrontPage, which you could use to build a website. I bought the thing, read the first three chapters of the manual, muttered "Right, I've got it," and put up my website.

Alas! for the command economy and the huge world-bestriding commercial behemoths of yesteryear. Woe! to the poor citizen who has placed his trust in their permanence and infallibility. FrontPage, it turned out, was the Edsel of software packages. The web pages it generated were nightmares of redundancy and incompatibility. I stuck with it grimly, but in 2006 Microsoft stopped issuing new releases of the beast and folded it into a new package that (a) cost three times as much while (b) inheriting all FrontPage's worst features.

Wiser now, I resolved to rebuild my website from scratch, using the most elementary, basic tools I could find, preferably ones that did not bear the Microsoft logo. I taught myself the mark-up languages and set to it. It was in the course of planning out this larger rebuilding project that I lit upon one of the few original ideas I have ever had: the Virtual Attic. It came to me ...