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A Web of One's One

Earlier this year, I decided join the ranks of self-publishers fearlessly colonizing the World Wide Web like young urban turks gentrifying a formerly scary neighborhood. In Silicon Valley, I had been running into more and more of them every week, it seemed: enlightened, albeit self-absorbed, technoprofessionals who knew how to stretch a conversational transition and inform me that they had their own "home pages" on the Web. As one wag recently summed up the increasing urge to upload one's ego to a personal Web page, "I have a Web site, therefore I am."



I took to the Web to promote a book (50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time; Citadel Press; $14.95). The first step my co-author and I took was to locate a commercial Web provider to lease us some disk space on an Internet server. (If you're really a techno-geek, you can convert your own home computer and Internet connection into a server.) We settled on a provider in Santa Cruz and chose a commercial account with a base fee of $30 a month. This gets us 5 megabytes of disk space and a limited number of reader accesses. But since we quickly gobbled up our 5 megs (graphics guzzle tons of memory) and our accesses (about 500 a day) began to outstrip our quotas, we soon began to pay in the range of $50 or $60 per month.

We began simply by posting a few excerpted chapters from the book, dolled up with lots of colorful (memory-guzzling) graphics. We read up on HTML and "borrowed" some source code from a few gracious but unsuspecting donors.

As soon as we had some content up and running, we started hounding all the big Web indexers, like the Stanford-based Yahoo server and EINet Galaxy, to include our site in their heavily accessed listings. Because Web surfers want to see lots of new stuff every time they drop in, we began adding new content every week, and soon our little promotion had morphed into a full-fledged e-zine, with updates, interviews, archival material and lots of links to other sites on the Internet.

John Whalen