John Allred

I'm a writer, mostly. But right now, I'm constructing a large information website. I'd love to have you join me on the journey.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

I have to take a sidestep from this site to work on another site that presents a better opportunity to generate income.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

@Tim_Denning Not sure if I'm on track with you here, but I had an opportunity many years ago that I abandoned. It was a complex, elaborate information web site that would have lent itself to advertising. I thought it should be free, and finally found it to be too burdensome. Reviving it now.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

I'll begin the process of creating an entirely new shell for the website and then place all the fun things into it to build out its utility. If it enjoys the success I think it will, I'll roll it out to all fifty states, and to Puerto Rico and DC. This is going to be fun! 8/8

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

You might be wondering why I would want to create a website like this one. A few things came together twenty-some-odd years ago. My brother spent many years through the 70s and 80s researching a book on how the State of Mississippi came into being. /1

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

I pulled them out of mothballs and began trying to resuscitate the site, like getting an old car that's been in a barn for forty years to fire up again. Fire up, it did, and I'm gratified that I'm having fewer problems with it than I'd anticipated. /7

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

For instance, show me every town name in the towns table where the county name is "adams." It gets a bit more complex than that sometimes, but that's generally what databases do. They extract data based on criteria that you supply. 2/2

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

If you've never built a website or app with info from a database, information is stored in tables that look a bit like Excel tables. They have relationships with other tables, and that allows you to pull together all sorts of content. /1

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

I'm getting really excited. For the longest time, I couldn't access my original site from the early 2000s and have the scripting work. I've been working through it this morning, though, and its starting to come together.
This image shows an operational page on my testing site.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

This new site will become a system of websites. Right now, I'm developing it at https://t.co/NCu7v3iIbE, and that has information for Mississippi. But, later, all the counties will have a subdomain, like https://t.co/mXycpAEAp0 or https://t.co/yT4K3DdxRU.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

I took time out to make a short (5-min is short?) video on a modification to one of my site's image files.
https://t.co/Mus4ssnciy

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

The new site is taking shape at https://t.co/ePhr0owVsf. It will look different nearly every time you visit. Right now, it's sporting a 500 - Internal Server Error, because a query in the code is looking for something it can't find. I'll have this fixed shortly.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

The site used a database and scripting, so navigating the snapshot version is difficult and confusing. Most of the images are missing, too. But, at its heart, this site was a compendium of web sites and pages about people and places in Mississippi.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

The website I created back in the late 90s was https://t.co/AcbgMLvBVF. I gave up the url. Somebody else owns it. But, for anyone interested, there is a snapshot version of it on the Wayback Machine: https://t.co/gpCTE1jgn6.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

I'm in the midst of reviving a huge web site that, inexplicably, I killed a number of years ago. Then, it was a labor of passion. Today, I feel that same passion, but I also see its potential to provide me an income. I was opposed to that back in my younger, purer days.

[John Allred @AllredWrites]

Just came across an intriguing idea in my morning dash around the internet. The idea is to publish your progress on a project (book, business, or other creative endeavor) to twitter. To take your followers along on your journey. I'd be interested to hear your feedback.