Describe some of your background and/or experience in electronic media, web development, and computers.

I'm an M.Sc. in computer science. I've been working with computers since I was in grade 7, starting with a Commodore Pet, then running through the C64, Amiga 500, and Amiga 4000. I started university in physics, but transferred to computer science because I enjoyed it more, and, while studying at the University of Western Ontario, started hacking around with the brand-new World Wide Web. I started off with a standard "This is me and these are the links I like" homepage, which got old fast -- I figured that if I was going to put something on the Web, it should be something unique, which is what lead to the RzWeb.

What prompted the decision to develop RzWeb as a WWW publication as opposed to other media mediums?

The RzWeb started life as a more traditional document. I created a catalog of my collection of Residents material called "The Almost Complete Guide to the Works of The Residents". It was basically a collection of the liner notes & programs from the albums & videos, typeset as closely to the way the originals were as LaTeX would permit. The idea was to teach myself just what could be done with LaTeX.

When the Web came along and I was looking for something unique to put on it (as I mentioned above), the Almost Complete Guide came to mind. Here, however, the idea wasn't to duplicate the original Guide in HTML, but rather to try to produce a document which actually uses the web structure that hypertext provides to produce a true hypertext book -- without having everything so unstructured as to be unnavigatable.

Explain a bit of the history behind RzWeb.

Following from the background above... The RzWeb started life as "A Guide to the Works of The Residents" -- I'd dropped the "Almost Complete" since I wasn't restricting myself to my own collection any more -- which was a fairly straightforward conversion of the original LaTeX Guide to HTML, with a lot of cross-referencing worked in through the hypertext added in, and the copyrighted lyrics and liner notes taken out.

The early Guide was a rather cumbersome document to get around in, and I spent a while experimenting with navigation buttons and chapter arrangements before settling on the fairly simple back/up/forward/down icon bar that it has now (though the graphics have changed since then) and the current chapter divisions. The icon bar is pretty standard -- most people who have such a thing use the same basic idea. I had tried a bunch of other possibilities and came to the conclusion that everyone else had gotten it right, after all.

The chapters were, and still are, a problem... The Guide is divided up by type of work: albums, singles, shows, multimedia, and so on. But many of The Residents' works can't be easily classified that way. A recent example is "Gingerbread Man", which is an album and a CD-ROM all at once... I'm still playing around with changes in the chapter layout.

The Residents found out about the site in November, 1994. I received email from the Cryptic Corporation congratulating me on my work and giving me permission to use any lyrics, liner notes, sound samples, or images that I want, which was great. The band also sent me a copy of "Uncle Willie's Highly Opinionated Guide to The Residents", the first book about the group that I'd seen.

The Guide turned into RzWeb last October (on my birthday) with a major, major rewrite which increased the size of the site by 30%. At that point it changed from a fairly straightforward listing of the Rz's works with brief commentaries into a detailed history of the band. I had read up a lot on the group, not only in Uncle Willie's book and the newsletters from his by-then-defunct fan club Uncle Willie's Eyeball Buddies, but from other books I could find, and several books & articles which were sent to me by my readers.

The most recent developments on the pages were the creation of a number of Perl scripts which do things like automatically extract references from the text to create three indexes (Records, Songs, and People/Places/Things), convert the discography maintained by Mark Plainguet into an HTML file on the RzWeb, or create graphs summarizing the site access statistics.

Describe or explain your association (if any) and intrigue with the Residents and their body of work.

I'm not associated with the Residents as such, except as a fan. I first became aware of them when they appeared in Matt Howarth's "Savage Henry" comic book... I had figured that they were just more strange characters since, after all, the story also features Australian devil-dingoes & the like. But eventually I noticed that the Guys with Eyes were listed as "guests" in the introduction, along side Nash the Slash, who I knew was for real... So I kept my eyes open, and eventually found a couple of Residents albums at a second-hand record store: Tunes of Two Cities and Intermission, both from the Mole Trilogy.

The music was amazing. Strange, clever, intriguing... I started buying up all the Residents stuff I could find. Eventually I became known as the "Difficult Listening Music Guy" at my local fantasy role playing game group, because I'd take it upon myself to provide music if no-one else did, and I often put Residents albums on.

I've always been the type who dives right in when he runs into something he likes: I snarf up everything I can find pertaining to an artist/author/ whatever as quickly as I can. The Residents were another case like that, but there was just so *much* of their work, they soon started to dominate my CD collection, which is one of the reasons they were chosen for my LaTeX practice -- along with the fact that their wonky typesetting would be a challenge.

Where do you see RzWeb going, stylistically, developmentally, socially?

At the moment, the RzWeb's main evolution is in location rather than content... I've just finished my Master's degree, and I've entered the Wide World of Real Life. I don't know just yet where the RzWeb will end up, which is a pain -- UWO is kindly letting me keep it there until I'm settled somewhere, but it creates 40% of the traffic on the Computer Science Department's Web server, so they'll be happy to see it go.

I've been offered the residents.com domain by one of my readers, who had reserved it for the band before they registered crypticorp.com instead, so wherever it ends up, it'll have its own name.

Stylistically, I don't anticipate any major changes for the next while, except perhaps to continue to refine the graphics. I've been playing with JavaScript, adding a navigator bar down the side of the page, but I don't intend to make the pages JavaScript dependent -- all the way along, I've been trying to keep the RzWeb as Netscape-free as possible (by which I mean I've been trying to avoid *any* proprietary HTML, not just Netscape's -- they're just the biggest offender in that area). I do plan to make full use of HTML style sheets when they are finalized, but again, not to the detriment of readers whose browsers don't support them.

Socially? Well, I intend to keep up my correspondence with my readers & the people on the Residents email digest, Smelly Tongues (see my "Where to Find More Info" page for details about that). I hope eventually to get down to San Francisco and meet the people at the Cryptic Corp & Ralph America, and maybe some of my readers as well.

What sort of response have you gotten from RzWeb?

The response has been amazing. Most notably, The Residents themselves, speaking through the Cryptic Corp, have been very generous with their praise of my work. My readers have also been very encouraging and helpful, sending me megabytes of images and text, not to mention swapping tapes of hard-to-find material that I'd never heard. I've attracted the attention of a number of people who work with the Residents as well, who are seeing the RzWeb as a way of promoting their products -- some of the people behind the "Bad Day on the Midway" CD-ROM sent me copies of the game & the guidebook to incorporate into the pages; the head of Vaccination Records sent me the preview 7" single of his Residents tribute album, "Eyesore", (the CD will be following shortly) in return for a mention in the RzWeb -- which I'm more than happy to provide, of course! It's been quite an experience: I never expected this degree of enthusiasm for my work.

How much time do you spend creating and maintaining RzWeb?

Oh, hard to say, really. Sometimes, when other work is slow, I'll spend an entire day, or even weekend, plugging away at it. Other times I'll go for weeks without touching anything. Lately development has been slow, as you can tell from the "What's New" chronology, because of my initiation to the world of Employment...

What are some of the tools (hardware/software) do you use for the development of RzWeb?

I do all my HTML authoring with vi. I've tried several HTML editors, but none of them have been very satisfactory, so I code everything by hand. Repetative things, like changing a phrase in all of the 255 HTML files in the RzWeb, is handled using Perl scripts that I write myself.

The graphics are mostly scanned (usually using DeskScan on a Mac), then cropped & gamma corrected using xv. For further work, such as sharpening or touching up, I usually use Paint Shop Pro on a Windows box or Personal Paint on my Amiga, and finally, the images are scaled to their final size using NetPBM, which has the finest scaling function I've seen. Almost all of the images are scaled to at most 150 pixels on the side, to keep loading times down, but some of the title pictures and a few of the gallery images are larger.

The rendered RzWeb logo (the Eyeball-spider in the web) was created using the demo version of Caligari's TrueSpace.

And that about covers it. I don't use any "Web Authoring" software at all, in fact, having found most of it to be more of a hindrance than anything. What I *really* need in an HTML editor is an easy way of plunking URLs for files into the document. A demo person from SGI who was showing off WebForce suggested that I make up a list of all the URLs and just use cut & paste! I can do *that* with vi and it doesn't cost thousands of dollars. Netscape's new Gold package editor is not bad that way, though. However, in order to accomodate my automated indexing, I need to be able to put special attributes into the tags (CLASS and NAME, mostly) which gets cumbersome in any editor.

What is your general opinion of the WWW currently? Best aspects? Worst aspects?

I think the Web is great. I generally use it to pursue my hobbies, like music, science fiction fandom, comix, and so on, and there are a lot of *really* good personal sites out there. In fact, it's the personal hobby sites which really make the web great -- most commercial sites are just bland beyond belief. For example, compare the official Babylon 5 website to the fan-run "Lurker's Guide" or Voltayre's "Encyclopedia Xenobiologica". Those last two sites are amazing resources, while the first just looks like something Warner Bros. slapped together so that they could be on the web.

My primary gripe about the Web is the constant hype about the latest proprietary "enhancement" that someone's come out with for the Web. Until recently, almost all of Netscape's enhancements were features that already existed in the developing HTML+/HTML 3.0 standard, which Netscape completely undermined by coming up with their own code. As a result, the standards behind the Web, especially HTML, have been badly balkanized.

Frames & JavaScript can be very nice, I'll agree, but more often than not they reduce the readability of a site, either by making it too slow and awkward to get around, or just crashing the browser at inopportune times. I've given up on several sites when they went JavaScript with buggy code (or with good code but a buggy JavaScript interpreter in Netscape) which brings down my browser.

Where do you see the WWW going in the future? What would you like to see?

Well, obviously, I'd like to see a strong, solid standard. The recent move to have HTML back under the control of the W3C is good news, at any rate.

I hope that the fascination with Java & JavaScript will mean that not *too* many more new standards pile on top of the already rather precarious collection we have now. Though I *am* looking forward to style sheets (and have been for a couple of years now), since they will provide good layout control without compromising the content-based markup that HTML provides.

What are some of your other interests outside of the Residents and RzWeb?

Well, there's my *other* website, the Goon Show Scripts, which has about a score of scripts from the old BBC radio comedy program "The Goon Show" (which influenced a majority of the Monty Python gang). I'm a science fiction buff, as you may have gathered by now, and generally entertain myself by curling up with a good book & some music when I'm not working away on the Web.