What is Snowhenge ?
Snowhenge.net is published by me, David Mantripp. It reflects me in that it has a split personality, being both a home for my photography and associated stuff, but also a place for writing about technical things or anything which catches my interest as a user centered design professional. It also has a meta-identity, since it lets me experimenting with web publishing, and in particular CSS and database content management. I do test on Mac & Windows on most browsers, but there is still quite enough to make things go wrong, and probably plenty of errors too. Same old story. It should work well enough in any standards-compliant browser, but then again the Titanic shouldn't have sunk. It looks better on a Mac, but then so do most things...
If you're also interested in really cracking this web design problem, I strongly recommend taking a look at these guys. I attended their 2004 workshop in Milan, and whilst I don't really apply the results here, I certainly am doing so elsewhere. The CSS genius who built their web site, Douglas Bowman, has his own website at stopdesign. which is also highly recommended.
Yes, very interesting, but what is Snowhenge ?
Snowhenge is, or was, an artefact built in January 1992 on the Filchner Ice Shelf, Antarctica. It's architects were myself, Jeff Ridley, and Peter Webb. It doesn't have a deep and meaningful reason, but it goes to show that there isn't much on TV in Antarctica. It was used in an experimental effort to invoke Druidic powers to refill a sadly depleted bottle of Bushmill's best Irish Whiskey, but this ended in tragic failure.
GLACE Twin Otter approaching Snowhenge International Airport, February 1992.
Other Snowhenges
As far as I can tell, ours was the first and original Snowhenge. But a few other Great Minds have thought alike, as a quick search of the web reveals:
- Snowhenge in the Ross Sea
- Witchcraft Snowhenge 2001
- Avebury, England, 1999
- Patriot Hills, Antarctica 1998 (no picture)
- Snowhenge in Lexington. (thanks Nicola for finding this one!)
- A nonsensical ex-Snowhenge in Goshen, Indiana.
- And another Antarctic Snowhenge. We were first though. And best :-)
They come and go...broken links have been killed. But do let me know if you know of any others.
This website is more or less built and maintained by hand, using BBEdit. The photo library is hosted in MySQL, accessed through PHP. The library is automatically synchronised with my desktop system using a combination of iView Media Pro, Runtime Lab's MacSQL and Panic Transmit FTP all loosely held together with several fragile pieces of AppleScript. But it usually works...