About Waltonschauung

What's with the name?

Waltonschauung is derived from the German Weltanschauung, a term popular in political science which translates as "world-view". Combined with my last name, it means, of course, "My view."

Just who is this bozo?

Andrew F. Walton is a journalist and semi-professional geek in Atlanta, Georgia. I used to feel self-conscious and a bit pretentious calling myself a journalist, but I keep doing it and they keep paying me, so I must not be too terrible at it.

I work for CNN.com. My second interview was on the day the site launched, and the guy who interviewed me still had pancake makeup on from his TV appearance. They tried to lay me off after the AOL debacle, but it didn't take.

Before I discovered the Web, and further discovered that there were jobs in it, I worked in print production. For a while, I worked for MacTemps, which was a great agency. They have since changed their name to Aquent, probably under the giddy influence of image consultants. That was after the last time I worked for them.

Why doesn't this site use more (frames/java/Flash/streaming video/smoke and mirrors)?

My basic philosophy of online design is that technology serves content, and that the most effective page is the one that is is fast, unobtrusive and useable on the broadest possible range of devices, browsers and connection speeds. The design of this page attests to my basic minimalism, both in terms of bandwidth demands and an almost Bauhaus aesthetic.

The snazzy new technology has its place. I just don't do anything on this site that justifies it. Flash intro pages are a plague on the Web. Don't give me a Flash movie with a "skip intro" button; give me a vanilla HTML page with a link to the Flash in case I have time to kill.

If I'm promoting a movie, I'll have streaming video. If I become a cartoonist, I'll use Flash. But as long as I'm just writing and taking photos, I'll use the best tool for the job. I don't drive nails with a wrench handle. I don't trim my nails with a butcher knife. And I don't use Flash to deliver text and stills.

And, yes, I know that my site uses HTML kludges that have been obsolete for a while. I'm working on it. No promises and no timetables; if I commit to a schedule for my free time, it is no longer free time.

Atticus? Why atticus?

After Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer/father in To Kill A Mockingbird. It was the first assigned book in high school English that I began and couldn't put down until I finished it. Atticus is my favorite literary role model, not an uncommon sentiment in the South.

The movie version, with the late (a moment of silence, please) Gregory Peck as Atticus and the alive-and-kicking Brock Peters as Tom Robinson, is also excellent.

Who's responsible for this?

The content is all mine, and if you try to pin it on anyone else, you'd better hope they have stupid lawyers.

The site is hosted by Earthlink since their buyout of Mindspring. I joined Mindspring when it was a small local ISP in Atlanta, was one of their first thousand users, and have not been seriously tempted to switch. Their DSL service is humming like a well-maintained old Hemi. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

These pages were created and have been maintained on various flavors of Macintosh, from the Mac II to my aging-but-still-vital G4/867, running Mac OS 7.5 to 10.3 ("Panther" -- F9. F10. F9. F10. It's addictive).

As far as I can recall, these pages are utterly free of the taint of Microsoft-specific code (I've previewed them in Exploder, but never in Exploder alone).

I've tried WISYWYG Web tools, but keep coming back to BBEdit, a robust ASCII editor with fantastic HTML (and other coding) tools. With a little practice, it's the fastest page creation tool going -- and it's not available for Windows. So there.

Most of the photos are from various Olympus digital still cameras. The more recent ones are from my little friend and constant companion, a Minolta Dimage 7. Graphics and photos have been prepared in Adobe Photoshop versions 3 through 7.