An Art-Related Quote for You…

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“For decades, the liberals have pretended that they can be anti-big-business, anti-commerce, and anti-marketing — while still being staunch defenders of free speech. But in a free society — where art and literature are not monopolies of the state — the private sale and marketing of books, movies, music, etc., is the indispensable means by which artists and intellectuals express their ideas. The phrase ‘a free marketplace of ideas’ is not just a figure of speech — and it’s no coincidence that the Federal Trade Commission, created to impose sweeping controls on business, is now being used to spearhead controls on art.”

“As a last ditch attempt to hide the truth from the public (and, I suspect, from themselves), the censors have claimed that they prefer to have the industry accept new ‘voluntary’ guidelines — backed up by the threat that if filmmakers don’t ‘volunteer’ to muzzle themselves within six months, the tanks will start rolling in.”

“It is the job of our intellectual leaders to expose these smokescreens and sound the alarms against would-be censors. They haven’t been doing their job, so we have to do it ourselves. “

from The Censorship Smokescreen By Robert Tracinski

Art Friends (retired)

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One of things that the web is useful for is tracking down former acquaintances. I find myself going to a search service like Google and typing in the names of people I used to know in hopes of finding out more about what has happened to them since we last saw each other (a Google hint: type the name in quotes for more accurate results). I do this half out of curiosity and half out of jealousy over those who went on to bigger and better things. I would think that these folks, creative as they all are, became as interested in the web as myself and would have decided to make their own self-indulgent web pages like I did.

Unfortunately, most of my peers seem to have not gotten involved in making web pages. This page is my attempt at adding some of these names into the great web-indices in hopes that other folks wanting to find out more about their friends, colleagues and former classmates might hookup once again. Think of this as a mini alumni report.

If you see your name on this like and want to say hello, if I forgot to put your name on this list, or want me to link to your web site, by all means drop me a line! I will warn you that lately I have been pretty bad at getting back to people. Just keep bugging me and I will eventually remember to change the site or at least write you back. If I were smarter I would make this a fully automatic web database that each individual could update on their own. Anyhow, let the name dropping begin:

UPDATE: I am no longer maintaining this list. If you found this page, good for you, but I just keep it around for historical reasons.

University of Wisconsin

University of Illinois

New Website Launched!

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Well, it’s official. Robert Wm. Gomez’s Pages of Fun have moved to a new, personalized domain name: www.robertgomez.org! I was surprised I was able to get the .ORG domain (robertgomez.com has been taken for as long as I have been checking).

In addition to this new address, The Pages of Fun have been completely rebuilt from the ground up using a fancy content management system called Drupal. I’ve tried to keep the look and feel of the site as close to the previous version as possible. The most noticeable change is that the layout has gotten wider to accommodate for all of the content management tools and navigation elements of Drupal. You may also notice you favorite page is gone. I tried to move everything over, but a couple things got lost in the move. But don’t fret. Now the site is searchable!

Design tweaks aside, the new system will make updating my site so much easier for me. That MAY mean more frequent updates, and, after a decade of resisting, this site might officially become a blog! Like other bloggy sites, I now have opened areas for visitor’s comments—that could be a mixed blessing. We’ll see how many spazzes feel the need to chime in.

One more thing. I now have a proper rss feed. I will be glad to never have to hand-code XML again. Please go to rss.xml and subscribe to stay on top of the latest additions to the site.

Pages o’ Fun Version 5.5 – 2011-2015

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This is yet another iteration of the previous design. By 2011 I had a much better understanding of how templating worked in Drupal and made a somewhat slicker template that adhered to 960 grid-style layout. Sometime during this period I did an upgrade to Drupal 7 and had to reworked the layout to be compatible with 7. In the process I made the site mobile-friendly with a responsive design.

Pages of Fun: Version 3.3 Dec 1999-Sept 2000

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One of the first things I did when I bought by new computer was update my personal site. I was and am still pleased with this result. It was my first serious use of style sheets, and for awhile had some cool animated buttons at the top. The animations were kind of flaky so I got rid of them early on. I liked the organization and relatively clean text layout.

The big problem with this version was that it rendered rather poorly in Netscape 4 despite the fact that it used a different style sheet for Netscape. A problem I still deal with in the current site, but to a far lesser degree (Please leave Netscape 4 to die, it is a really terrible browser…6 looks promising though). It was also way too table heavy for my more simplified HTML structured tastes, making it tedious to update and change.

Pages of Fun: Version 2.0 1998-1999

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This version is many ways a slickened up version of v1.0. It uses much of the same color palette, but uses frames in a much more… er… elegant way. Say what you will, I think frames are a great idea and wish they wouldn’t get phased out like it looks like they will be. Anyhow, this site was typical of its time in that it was loaded with plug-in requiring sound effects, bloated rollovers, and lots of tables. Although, I was rather pleased with the liquid design that would fill the browser no matter how wide you stretched it.