THERE’S
A JAY in next door’s sumac; it’s rare for it to
touch down in the garden, although when there are acorns we often see them
flying across the meadow to the large oak in a back garden three doors up the
road.Off the Page |
Richard Bell's Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, Friday, 5th October, 2007 |
THERE’S
A JAY in next door’s sumac; it’s rare for it to
touch down in the garden, although when there are acorns we often see them
flying across the meadow to the large oak in a back garden three doors up the
road.
This rudimentary GIF animation of jays flying over the meadow (right) appeared in this diary nine years ago, on 7th October 1998. I’d started my online diary just three days before that (below, left) and managed to keep up consecutive entries for just one more day before taking a week’s break but, following that, I missed out November altogether.
In the early days I compiled my web pages with Homesite and Photoshop 4. Despite the slow process of designing and uploading pages on my Amstrad computer via a dial-up connection, I must have been keen to explore the possibilities of the medium as, after less than a week, I took the trouble to learn how to make this animated GIF using the then free Microsoft Gif Animator.
Nature Diary, A4 (8 x 11.5 inch format)
October 1998
There
weren’t many examples for
me to model my diary on at that time as, according to an article in Wikipedia,
the first online personal diaries had appeared
only 4 years earlier in 1994. The term ‘weblog’ was first used
in December 1997 and the short form, ‘blog,’ wasn’t coined
until the
spring of 1999.
The layout, such as it is, of my online diary, was based on the illustrated page-a-day nature diaries that I’d kept off and on, in one form or another, for the previous 25 years. I've just taken my 1998 diary from the shelf in the attic to photograph it (above).
It's a
shame that my hand-drawn, sometimes coloured, diary pages more or less came
to an
end when I started
the online
version but those previous diaries of mine just sit on the shelf in the attic
and are never seen, whereas the online version can be accessed by anyone with
an internet connection - including myself. It's much easier for me to use the
Free-find search on my home page than it is to go up into the attic and riffle
through all those old diaries.