archives
![[a squirrel]](squirrel_0589.jpg "A squirrel, a fitting mascot for the archives section because I, too, have hidden away little morsels of sustenance for the long winter ahead...")
contents
The ellars.com archives are a collection of pages and sites created by Michael Ellars that are no longer being updated, but still hold some value (even if only sentimental). These pages have been placed here so that others may peruse them. But be forwarned: these pages have not necessarily been "fixed" to play nicely in the archives, so broken links are likely to abound.
msenet designs
MSEnet.org
MSEnet.org serves as the index for the various developmental stages of MSEnet, my personal web site while a student at the University of Southern California School of Architecture. Rather than repeating the information about the design and development of MSEnet here, please visit there instead.
ellars.com designs
ellars.com (v0.1b)
Before the original, there was another concept. Thankfully, my better tastes prevailed, and I continued designing until I came up with ellars.com Mk.1.
ellars.com ("arriving soon")
While I worked on the "real" design for ellars.com, I threw together a placeholder page. It's design was inspired by the splash page for msenet****, modified to reflect the color scheme for the new ellars.com.
ellars.com (Mk.1)
The first iteration of ellars.com survived three-and-a-half years, which was something of a record for me at the time (though since eclipsed by the longevity of Mk.2). The design was intended as a step towards greater simplicity, but in the end even it became too large and unwieldly -- eventually leading to the design you see here today.
ellars.com (Mk.2 alpha)
My first pass at a simplified design for ellars.com ended up being not that simple at all. However, it did provide me with a place to experiment with different technologies, especially advanced CSS features.
ellars.com (Mk.2 final)
The version of ellars.com that ended up lasting the longest, at least so far, starting in 2003 and running into 2009. This long-running version featured a simple style sheet switcher that allowed the visitor to stay with the default white background or change to Ellars blue or black backgrounds. Mk.2 probably would have lived on for much longer had I not married Natalee in January 2009. The addition of another Ellars mandated a shift in the focus of ellars.com from a personal site to a family site, and Mk.2 was retired in June 2009 after over six years on the World Wide Web.
question-based designs
bltss/~fh
An interesting space-themed design based around the "core" questions: who, what, when, where, how, and why? This site was intended as a test-bed for cross-platform browser compatibility; hence the first text on the page, which proudly declares that the site is "best viewed with a web browser".
the michael s. ellars project
This page was one of the earliest concepts for organizing the collection of sites now housed at MSEnet. As with bltss/~fh, it was organized around the "core" questions. Even thought it never progressed beyond the basic layout displayed here, many of its concepts have found their ways into more recent designs, including here at ellars.com.