This site is a documentation of my attempts to understand computers, the Internet, and the world we live in, in keeping with my mission stated above and with the goals I elaborate below.   I don't claim to be an expert in any of the fields that I cover.  I simply gather the best hyperlinks I can find and arrange them in logical groupings, sometimes with commentary.   Andilinks' being a publicly available directory is not incidental, it is an important part of my learning dynamic.

Often I get things wrong the first time, that is a part of the process.   Usually I find my own errors, sometimes a kind reader will point them out   Over time the world seen with the lens of Andilinks comes into ever greater focus.   I confine my categories to topics that interest me and tools that are a necessary means to exploring those topics.   My formal training is in language and literature but I've always had a fascination with technology and economics and their effect on our civilization.

This website is an annotated bookmark file.   Some of the categories date back to my first Netscape 4.0 browser and existed even earlier on a Macintosh before the World Wide Web was invented.   But it is not a bookmark file without content.   If links make up the largest component of the site, then the content is arrangement, taxonomy, and of course commentary.

Commentary is not limited to comments with specific links or categories but includes commentary on the process itself.   There have been a few surprising developments along those lines.   An interesting one being that the page where I explain how I check all these links has become the second most visited (Link Checking Routine).  

Andilinks is a response to a thicket that everyone who searches on the internet encounters. While you are searching for one thing specifically you don't have time to be side-tracked.   Yet along the way you find so many things that you "want to get back to."   You add links to your Favorites file and later begin organizing them with the cascading menus.   But eventually this gets so out of hand that you realize this task will never be finished.   I am doing that here in a big way, the most common criterion for a link's inclusion is a desire to come back and continue the exploring.   There are a number of bookmark utilities that can help, I have them listed here.   Had I found one of these before I began Andilinks my life might have taken another course.   I'm glad I didn't, building this website has been an enlightening and rewarding experience.   Further down this page there is additional history on how Andilinks began.

Building the website and the underlying database is a process that will eventually give me some expertise.  It is expertise and knowledge that I seek to gain by this and not any direct income, which is why no ads appear here and will not unless the traffic load exceeds my willingness to pay for it.   Since April 2002 the traffic to this site has slowly but steadily grown, and there have been a few amazing spikes when this link was incuded in a newsletter or blog.   Given the number of searchers out there and the fact that this site continually improves, traffic growth could continue for a long time.   But there is little danger of Andilinks going commercial at any time soon--the "dot com" notwithstanding.

Andilinks aids me with researching, tracking and picking technology winners but there is not currently a profit motive associated directly with this site.   Over the coming months and years I plan to observe the information sector carefully with the tools I have developed and discovered while building this database and website.

Someday of course, it should be possible for this website to break even or turn a profit with some commercial endeavor.   The economy will pick up and though the madness of the 1990's will not return, commerce on the web will continue to grow and the medium will mature.   The shape and nature of any future Andilinks enterprise remains unclear at this time, but one of the goals of this site is to explore those possibilities.

The desire to be fluent in the language of Information Technology and the economic utility of that fluency does fuel and justify these activities.   That our culture is increasingly bound with the information revolution keeps my interest most vital.   I do plan to delve further into the cultural, social and historical aspects of the information sector when I gain more knowledge.

The database is a useful and valuable library of knowledge that anyone can use and I am publicly posting many important parts of it.   But an experimental and innovative goal is the integration of the database functions into my own thought processes so that they become a seamless part of my intelligence.   I want to be able to conduct a phone or online conversation and be quick enough with the database to be able to access any part of it without having to say "I'll get back to you on that."

I am far from that goal at the moment partly because the amount of information contained in the database is not yet large enough to be seriously consequential.   It is my own skill and not computing power that is the limiting factor at this time.   The fact that the hyperlink is the central component of the website reflects the fact that no matter how big or good my database might be, it is just one tiny node of the collected knowledge that is the Internet and beyond.   Following is a description of the database and then some history.

About the database:  The Andilinks database is an MS Access97 .mdb file first created on March 23, 2002.   As of 9/29/2003 it contains over 31,000 records in six tables: Links, Companies, People, Glossary, Categories, History.   Currently only data from the tables "Links" and "Glossary" are used in the listings, aided by the lookup table "Categories."   Most of the data in the "Categories" table is used on the Categories A-Z page.   Each table has a "memo" field which is a catch-all for copy/paste notes or my personal observations on each record.   I manipulate data at this time with VBA scripts associated with MS Office97 applications.  

I am presently adding tables to the database that will aid with the maintenence of website functions.   The cataloging and linkage of style sheet attributes, templates, macros and category types will amount to a custom content management system specific to this purpose.   While I find this an interesting and stimulating challenge I do not plan to take the system beyond this website.

I may, at some time in the future deliver some of this data directly to the website with a server-side database but for now I plan to continue posting static pages.   If I am not adding links to this database I am busy learning database design and the many various aspects of the Information Technology industry.  

History: In the early morning hours of September 11, 2001 I was in my bedroom/workspace happily pounding away on my keyboard working on a frivolous but probably lucrative writing project.   My Dad pounded on my door and told me to turn on my television.   I clicked on the TV, closed the Word Window and watched the second plane hit in real time.   I remained transfixed on this coverage until January.   I never reopened Word on that computer, I never resumed work on that project.   My hope is that the Andilinks website will in some small way strengthen the system that is under attack.   That gets me out of bed in the morning.

In January 2002 I finally got started.   I bought a new computer and began surfing the Internet seeking ideas on how I might best use my particular skills.   I immediately got bogged down while trying to reorganize the HTML bookmark file that I had imported from the old computer.   I didn't want to use the cascading menus on the Internet Explorer or Netscape Browsers, I wanted to organize the links onto pages in my own patterns.   I began doing that and emailed the pages to friends and family.   Soon I realized that I could just post the pages to web space already available to me.   Once I began posting HTML pages online it became apparent that to control and manipulate the links I needed to enter them into a database.

I barely knew the difference between an HTML tag and a DKNY tag at the time so I am pleased that within two months I had a website on AOL called Andilinks and in four months I had my own domain and twelve pages.   Currently it is 60 pages which include archives and earlier versions of Andilinks.    I do still write some fiction, though the nature of that writing has changed considerably since 9/11.

To those who know me and have a long memory, yes this is a lot like a pre-Internet HyperCard project I did on my ancient Mac SE called Pieces in the Puzzle.