Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday March 30, 2007 - 06:21pm (CDT)
This post previously sent the reader to a page at Angelfire that I replaced after Tripod (another subsidiary of Angelfire's parent company) censored one of my pages in response to a meritless complaint. The page at WebNG will have a sister site at 1hwy.com
Not that much deliberation was needed. For reasons given on this page
http://josephdunphy.webng.com/
I had found myself with a site at Angelfire which wasn't seeing adequate use, and when one thinks about what the usual visitor complaint is, regarding pages on the Lycos server, one sees that this is an optimal use of that location.
The problem with Lycos is the advertising bar at the top of the page, which takes so exasperatingly long to load. One really doesn't want to make one's visitors go from one file to the next extremely often because of this. But Math, by its very nature, tends to run on - a math site on which I do proofs and work problems instead of just doing broad expositions is going to be a site on which page lengths naturally tend to be considerable, and on which the reader isn't likely to be skimming. He won't be happy about the slow advertising bar download, but he'll be more likely to be forgiving of it, especially, I suppose, because I'm not just giving him something that he wants, but very likely something that he needs.
"And beggars can't be choosers, Joseph?" No, I wouldn't say that, but I would say that beggars have more of an incentive to be understanding of paupers. I'm not as destitute as I used to be, but like most of those without tenure in this field, I'm struggling to get by in a job market in which the name of "Bangalore" has taken on a grim significance. My counterpart in India may be able to pay his rent and grocery bills in soft currency, but I can not, and so where my budget can't give in on one point, it must give in on another. If I could be assured of the funds, I would be delighted to take the ads off of my sites. I'm not happy to see my visitors inconvenienced at all, but I can only do what I can do, and seek out opportunities to find those for whom my best will be good enough.
