A few years back, I served as the Webmaster for Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University. In so doing, I spent a certain amount of time hacking around with this sort of stuff. Most of what I do (and much of what I've seen) probably could be categorized in the self-congratulatory ego pool that drives the Web (by and large), but it kept me from getting a real life. Some people might say that this is a good thing...

Basically, I do this for grins. I'm also personally amused by how much hype there is over how hard it is to do this stuff - much of it is pretty easy - and there might even be some value in it all for some purposes (other than getting rich). Oh...and I note that I do all the coding by hand - guess I'm not lazy enough to use one of those canned web-page development tools. :-)

I have several projects I'm hacking around with, but these are the ones I'm working on most often.

canuck.dnr.cornell.edu

The server you're currently looking at - my main web server. Since many of these pages are "general use" pages, and need to be accessed by a lot of people, using a WIDE variety of browser technology, I've had to balance techno-weeniedom with "portability". My latest prototype is a quick-loading vision steeped in Javascript - makes use of multiple redirects and pull-down lists. Actually, dead simple to implement once you understand a few techie bits, but no big deal. For more detail on the server, and how it is configured, click here. Oh, and why "canuck"? Simple - I'm a born and bred Canadian (howsitgoin, eh?)

Hypertext-based 'discussion forum'

I'm increasingly convinced that hypertext-based 'bulletin boards' are very useful for managing discussions about various technical subjects. I've implemented one such system, focused on discussion of the analysis of data from marked individuals. The forum can be found here.

bibliographic searches

A perl-based search engine for bibliographic searches which doesn't require all the formatting effort WAIS does. Click here to see a fairly fleshed-out version.

online textbooks

I've recently written a couple of books on mark-recapture (and related techniques), most recently on program MARK. The individual chapters are basic Adobe Acrobat files, packaged in a fairly intuitive 'web site'.

scientific meeting web pages

I've recently been signed on to do the web pages for a couple of different meetings. The sites are designed to be easy to use, provide all the right information, and to be as automated as possible. A good example is the EURING 2007 Conference. The site uses file uploads, binhex encoding, smart re-directs, and a few other whizzy things. I've also spent some time trying to make the site compatible with both IE and Netscape. A pain, but thats what "Bill" hath given the world...

software for population analysis

A commented list of different software applications for analysis of data from marked individuals (mark/recapture and so forth). One of my very first web pages, and it shows... :-)