Happy Birthday hawaii-nation.org

Today is the 13 years since the creation of hawaii-nation.org:

Registrant:
Nation of Hawaii
41-1300 Waikupanaha Street
Waimanalo, Hawaii 96795
United States

Domain Name: HAWAII-NATION.ORG
Created on: 12-Dec-94

This was my initiation into the Web. Kekula and I were living at Pu'uhonua O Waimanalo working with Bumpy in the early days after relocating Mauka after the occupation at Makapu'u. The World Wide Web was still unknown to most people. (Can you believe that was only 13 years ago? And, has is already been 13 years?) We were fascinated by even the very limited number of Web pages out there at that time. Our friend Pi showed me how to edit basic HTML and snatch code from other sites when I saw something I liked, and then I sat at the Nation's office on a Power Mac 6100 with a 28.8 modem building the hawaii-nation.org site.

I realized the Web would become huge, and that it would offer a very low-cost way to share information globally, free of any outside editorial control. My main goal was to put up primary historical documents so people could read the history for themselves and come to their own conclusions. I figured most people who took the time to would come to similar understandings and conclusions that I had, and this was the best way to get them out there. I keyed a lot of documents in myself, including lots of news articles. Papers weren't online yet, so the news article archive provides an interesting record of the movement during that time period, circa 94 - 99. The site has about 400 HTML pages. It is a sprawling site and not terribly well organized because it was my first one, but loving the kind of instant citation represented by hyperlinks, I spent a lot of time linking documents to each other in the text, so you can wander around in the site and click from one thing to another, and see how documents reference each other. Because it was a pretty deep resource and was one of the only sites on the topic at the time, it got a lot of links pointed to it, and a lot of traffic, which continues to this day. Out of it we also built up the hawaii-nation email list , which goes out to about 3000 people worldwide.

Later on, I realized this was a marketable skill, and I've been doing it ever since, and have been fortunate that most of my work (all word of mouth) has also been in service to valuable organizations and projects, including many other sites that share different perspectives of the Hawaiian experience—political, historical, cultural... Including this blog. But for me it all grew out of hawaii-nation.org, starting 13 years ago.

Posted: Wed - December 12, 2007 at 09:32 PM

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Happy Birthday hawaii-nation.org

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