Chronicle of North Forest Web Site

North Forest

Overview

I had already become a Christian when the internet became popular. I don't remember why I wanted to have a web site but I was a computer porgrammer at the time so it was easy to start one. I started on GeoCities but soon got my own domain which I named North Forest after an apartment building nearby. We didn't live there but I liked the name — it was kind of artsy and naturey. I went online in early 1999 starting out as northforest.com but changing to northforest.org in 2003.

My first web articles were originally hand-written: things I wrote for new-agers, atheists, or non-Christians to introduce them to Jesus:

What is Truth? 1992

The Way, 1992

God Exists, 1992

Letter to an Atheist, 1993

The Still, Small Voice, 1993

The Ramifications of Information Theory, 1993

The Light of the World, 1993

A Dialogue About the Nature of Reality, 1995

The World Religions, 1997

The Problem with God, 1998

Jo Anne's Cure, 1998

From day one my web articles were mostly about religious and Christian topics; they chronicled my views and beliefs. As I studied a topic I wrote an article about it.

For a while I had an article and photos of hurricane Floyd which I experienced first-hand.

From the beginning of my web site I had already started to break ranks with Fundamentalist, Evangelical Protestantism and I wrote about it all:

Creationism

Eschatology

In 2001 I went back to college to finish my B.A. in Social Science — several articles are class assignments:

Integrating Psychology and Christianity

To Spank or Not

Ethics

After this my I started writing more scholarly articles with supporting quotations as well as articles about various Social Science topics. Recently (2010) I began writing about environmental topics.

I added MP3 audio files thinking people would rather listen to me speaking than reading — but these were rarely listened to. I even started a podcast for a little while but realized that I did not want to have to regularly record and produce them. The only popular MP3 files are from my album, Living Faith, which became popular was when it was added as a link to to a Catholic Songs site.

When I became Catholic I had a prolific writing spree for many years but my research showed the historical problems with the Catholic Church which I dutifully documented. I have still not solidly landed in any Christian camp and probably never will.

Featured article: Apostolic Reformation of the Church

Format

Early on I purchased a book on web site design and designed the colorful (literally) scheme of my early articles with colorful (figuratively speaking) topic names (Journey, Kingdom of Israel). After a while I started writing collections of articles called "sub-webs" and added menus along the left edge.

I got tired of the "colorful" scheme and tried some other formats. Each experiment resulted in another home page and index page so there are now many of these which I keep around for old times' sake. I used to have many links to external sites (a few articles were really nothing more than this), but I don't like to do this anymore — I don't enjoy fixing the broken links all the time.

With over 250 articles now, my web site has become a jungle of information on many topics. Over the years I've tried various schemes to organize all the info but each has proven to be too limited and ultimately failed when I wrote yet more articles. Finally, in 2010 I created a new (and hopefully final) menuing scheme. I am in the process of converting all table of contents, indexes, and menus to my new menu scheme.

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