Low End Mac got its start six years ago when I posted about two
dozen Mac profiles on my personal Web space under the heading The New Low End User
Site. (Low End User was a defunct ezine dedicated to old Macs.) I
soon added Mac to the name, making it The
New Low End Mac User Site - way too
long. Soon I removed four of the seven words, and the site became Low
End Mac.
I had no idea what I was getting into, but I couldn't find the kind
of resource I wanted on the Web. Apple had some info. Macworld and
MacUser had some info. MacKiDo and MacInTouch had some info. And my
library of books and my archive of magazines had a lot of info.
So I began to compile the information about each pre-68040 desktop
Mac with at least 1 MB of RAM into a standard format, along with
some personal comments on the models covered. Looking back at our April 1997 archive, it was very
primitive, yet anyone familiar with Low End Mac's profiles today would
recognize these as the infant version of today's website.
By June we had already evolved the
design and begun to add pictures to some of our profiles. We were also
including additional content about accelerators along with a few
outside links on some of the profiles. We had also expanded to cover
Quadras and PowerBooks. Over time, Power Macs joined the mix.
Up, Up, and Away
The Web itself was only four years old (Mosaic, the first graphical
browser, was released on March 14, 1993), and I didn't have a clue what
I was getting myself into. I was sharing my knowledge, people were
somehow finding my pages, and we served 20,000 pages in June 1997, the
first month for which I have statistics.
We joined the MacTimes Network, which promised free hosting for our
pages and the possibility of some ad income. We moved during November
and served over 30,000 pages that month, 125,000 in April 1998 (our
first anniversary), and we zoomed past the 250,000 page per month mark
that August.
We moved to our own domain in February 1998 and separated from the
MacTimes Network at the end of March. Until September 1998, we operated
without banner ads, dependent on income generated from our handful of
email lists. A huge thanks to Small
Dog Electronics and MacResQ for keeping us going in those days.
We signed on with infiniMedia in September 1998 and later teamed up
with BackBeat Media. This "little site" had grown to a half million
pages per month, and the future looked bright.
I attended my first and only Macworld San Francisco in January 2001,
gave two weeks notice at my IT job upon my return, and dedicated myself
to publishing Low End Mac full time at the end of the month. Over the
course of that first year as an incorporated business, we grew site
traffic to the 1 million page mark. We've had our ups and downs since
then; today we average almost a million pages a month.
Down and Out
Of course, Murphy's Law had to get involved, and the very month I
quit my day job marked the end of the dot-com bubble. Ad rates fell
through the floor, and doubling site traffic wasn't enough to maintain
the level of income needed to meet our budget. Over the summer of 2001
readers donated thousands of dollars to keep Low End Mac afloat,
allowing me to attend my second (and quite possibly last) Macworld New
York.
I've been holding down a part-time job since September 2001,
starting at about 12 hours a week and now up to half time. I work in a
local camera shop, love the opportunity to help customers become better
photographers, and come home exhausted after 5-8 hours on my feet. It's
good work, but it really cuts into the time I can dedicate to Low End
Mac.
Over six years, Low End Mac has grown beyond my wildest expectation.
From a few dozen computer profiles we now cover every Mac, most of the
clones, the Lisas, the NeXT computers, and most of the clones. But the
bulk of our content is editorial - Mac Daniel advice columns, geek stuff in
the Online Tech Journal, personal
reflections from about a dozen different
contributors, and the occasional product review.
Lotsa Pages
I downloaded the entire website from our server in late March so I
could burn a couple of copies to CD-R just in case. Graphics and all,
we've got 17-18,000 files on the server taking up 120 MB of space. Of
that space, 47 MB is a mirror of the
old DayStar Digital website, including huge software files and PDF
manuals.
The original content on Low End Mac occupies about 70 MB of space on
our server. Between the four versions of our more recent editorial
content (printer friendly, WebTV, and mobile in addition to the regular
version), we have over 10,000 HTML pages on the site. Of those, over
5,000 are unique articles.
That's a lot of content generated in six years, far more than I
anticipated when I put up those first profiles or wrote my first
editorials. This averages out to almost three new pages a day for the
six years that Low End Mac has been around. No wonder we had to add a
search box to the site!
Our Readers
In a typical month we serve nearly a million pages to a quarter
million visitors. Some have our home page as their home page and visit
daily. Others come just once, read an article linked on MacSurfer, and
leave. More people visit Low End Mac using Winnows than Macs, although
over 60% of those visiting our home page are using Macs. Excluding
spiders, about 2% of our visitors are using some form of Linux or
Unix.
Although we focus on the low end, half the visitors to our home page
have a 1024 x 768 display. Next most common is 800 x 600 or Apple's
older 832 x 624, which accounts for 17% of our home page traffic.
Another 24% are using resolutions greater than 1024 x 768 (2% on 1152 x
768 TiBooks and 3% on 1280 x 858 TiBooks).
The old standard 640 x 480 display accounts for about 1.5%, and the
old compact Mac resolutions of 512 x 342 and 512 x 384 hardly show up
at all. Still, we try to accommodate them, as well as those using
WebTV and Palms.
Although there is no Netscape Navigator 5, 41% of those hitting our
home page use a browser that identifies itself as Netscape 5 (that
includes Mozilla, Camino, and Safari). Internet Explorer 5.x accounts
for 29%, and IE 6 (Windows only) makes up 19% of our home page traffic.
Only 4% of you are using Netscape 4.x, and iCab 2.x comes in at just
under 2%.
The Past Year and the Coming Year
Last summer we began automating the
site by adding a little PHP here, a bit more there. Today most of
the home page is generated by calling PHP scripts, as is our RSS news
feed. My next goal is to complete the process and switch from an HTML
page that calls several PHP scripts to making the bulk of each page a
PHP script that calls HTML content.
This will allow us to create regular, printer friendly, mobile
edition, and WebTV versions of our content from a single file -
eliminating the need for four separate templates for each type of
content. I will also investigate offering a second mobile edition
optimized for the larger screens used on many of today's newer PDAs
(our current mobile edition is specifically designed for the 160 x 160
pixel Palm screen).
Another feature we'll add is the ability for the reader to choose a
default type size, store that information in a cookie on their
computer, and view LEM content at their selected size. This is to
address the handful of people who complain the Low End Mac text is "too
big" - despite the fact that we're only displaying text in whatever
size you have set as the default in your browser.
We're also slowly moving away from Claris Home Page. The new
templates I'll be using with the PHP scripts will be as compliant with
the HTML specification as possible, although we'll probably never make
iCab smile. (iCab diverges from the HTML specification. Where HTML says
quote marks are optional in certain cases, iCab flags that as an error.
Since deleting unnecessary quote marks reduces our code base by 10%,
iCab can go on frowning as far as I'm concerned.)
LEMlists.com
We are working on a new list management system for our 30-some email
lists. These will all be hosted on the LEMlists.com domain.
Specifications for the new service grew out of limitations of the
system we're currently using:
A single database with all subscriber addresses will eliminate the
need for me to ask people which list(s) they are on.
Support for multiple email addresses per subscriber will make it
easier for someone to post from one address at home and another at
work. It will also give us a better handle on the number of unique
subscribers per list.
Global handling of feed vs. digest setting, vacation mode, etc. -
all done via email or a Web interface.
Email addresses will be spamproofed in the archive, making it
difficult (impossible would be nice, but spammers are so darned clever)
to spider the archives for addresses.
Ability to resend missed messages or digests.
Smart handling of styled email by stripping out the style markers.
(The lists are currently plain text only.)
Automatic stripping of attachments. (The lists currently reject any
messages with attachments.)
Scan incoming messages for quoted list footers and automatically
remove them.
Provide online access to the archives.
It's going to be quite the setup when it's done, but at this point
we're only at the most basic stage. We're very grateful to MacLaunch
for providing free hosting for the current lists, but the sheer number
of lists we run makes list management a real challenge.
LowEndMac.Net
We're officially launching LowEndMac.Net this month. We've
owned the domain for years, but it used to point to Low End Mac. No
longer. Now it will be an alternative to Apple's .mac service where
users can sign up for just an email address or for a whole range of
services.
The goal of LowEndMac.Net is to subsidize the financial needs of Low
End Mac by offering online services at reasonable prices - and only
charging users for the services they want.
Other Cobweb Publishing Sites
Low End PC never really took
off. It's not a bad little site, but despite the presence of billions
and billions of obsolete Intel PCs, there isn't nearly as much interest
in keeping them going as there is for older Macs.
Digital-Views.com, a review
site for DVDs and Video CDs, is something I haven't had the time to
work on since taking a part-time job.
Digigraphica, on the other
hand, is slowly coming into its own as more and more people want to
marry photography and computing. The site looks at both digital cameras
and film cameras, since a lot of people are now having their film
burned to CD or scanning photos. This website probably has the most
potential of any of our smaller projects.
ReformedNet grew out
of some research projects during my brief time at seminary. The primary
focus is the history of the Dutch Reformed religious denominations in
North America with a special focus on church growth patterns.
Unlike Low End Mac, none of these sites has ever taken in enough to
cover hosting costs - nor do any of these sites have paid staff, so
domain registration fees and hosting are their only expenses.
Like Low End Mac, they are labors of love. Whether they grow or not,
I hope they each offer useful information and helpful opinions freely
to all comers.
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