It was my agent, Eleanor Wood, who started it all. By the mid 1990s I had sold the Irish answer to the Taj Mahal that we had been renovating in Bray, County Wicklow (see "Sorry About That," in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution), to Phil Coulter, the well-known songwriter. Phil and Geraldine have six children too, and it was gratifying to see Killarney House continuing to be used as a family home that would be appreciated, instead of being turned into a pile of greasy flats for students as happens to so many fine old houses these days. Jackie and the boys had used part of the proceeds to acquire a place in northwest Florida, where the climate and general laid-back way of life were congenial to exercising the torpidity that comes naturally to cats and teenagers, while I had put the rest into a town house near the seafront in the center of Bray and converted it into a couple of apartments. One, I rented out to generate some useful extra income, while the other I kept for my own use when in Europe.
I was fortunate in finding an ideal tenant—an elderly widow with a son who was a construction worker in the town, and could take take care of repairs and maintenance when I was away in the U.S. The old lady would always be ringing the bell five minutes after I came back from abroad, saying she had heard me come in and put a pot of tea on the stove. We sometimes got embroiled arguments of a distinctly unusual kind for landlord and tenant.
"I see you've put up an outside light over the alley to the entrance at the back. How much was it? I'll give you a check."
"Ye will not, so!"
"Why wouldn't I? Isn't it my house that you've added to the value of?"
"'Twas our own decision. Ye weren't asked. So shut up and have a cup of tea."
The quality of life improves so much when maximizing the bottom line doesn't become the sole measure of everything.
Anyway, life was drifting into one of its tranquil periods again, which experience has shown invariably to be the prelude to some kind of upheaval. I was across in Florida—it would have been around the time I was working on Bug Park, or maybe Outward Bound, when Eleanor called from New York to say, "Jim, you need to get yourself a Web site."
"What for?"
"It's the way things are these days. The whole world is going online. All the writers are setting up Web sites."
"But you know I think everything invented after I turned fifty was unnecessary—and the world would probably have been better off without."
"It's the way to be visible and stay in touch. Really, it's something you should think about."
There was no way I was going to be dragged out of book-writing mode to start getting involved in HTML programming and whatever else this would need—I had only recently, grudgingly, converted to a PC, having been probably one of the last people left on the planet to be still using the TRS-80. (I'd also had a great time with the Commodore 64, writing rudimentary graphics games for the boys before most people had heard of them. That had to have been one of the neatest machines for its time.) But, hey, wasn't this the kind of thing that teenage sons are there for? So I took the matter to Alex, then aged around fourteen, whose bedroom had already become a computer assembly shop and meeting place for the local juvenile hackers, and said, "Why don't we put together a Web site?"
And so the first version of www.jamesphogan.com came about. It began as simply a reference resource for my novels, short stories, and other works. A decision that we made early on and have stuck to since was to keep a strongly text-oriented flavor. Much of the mail we've received indicates that visitors appreciate it. The purpose was to inform people, after all, and it's the text that tells you things. Even back then, the amount of fancy graphics, banners, wallpapers, and other ornamentation was irritating and made dial-up downloads infuriatingly slow—even before the appearance of ads, pop-ups, animations, and other rubbish proliferating today. (Excessive graphics and overelaboration are still the most effective things for making me tune out of sites that I visit—usually running out of patience before any content has appeared at all. Newspaper sites seem to be the worst offenders. The ones I like best are those that post in plain-text format—fast, and compact to store. The Thoth catastrophism newsletter is a good instance, at http://www.kronia.com/thoth.html. Where nothing of interest is lost, I prefer to store downloaded pages as text files.)
Of course, the inevitable happened. Once you've got a shop window to the world that people are coming to look at, you find all kinds of thoughts, opinions, and "takes" on various issues that you just have to air. But at least it's better to vent them in a place that anyone interested can choose to visit, than to insist on bogging your books down and turning them into pulpits, with the consequences that we've all seen and groaned at. So we added the Bulletin Board, featuring comments on areas of science that I tend to hold forth about if given the chance, politics, puns, and anything else that I happened to be of a mood to share on any particular day. The Board turned out to be quite popular, stimulating a lot of mail calling for responses that I hadn't exactly bargained for. But such is the price of leading with one's chin, I suppose.
It's customary for a book-publishing contract to specify a quantity of copies for the author when a new title or edition is released. With hardback and paperback editions, various reissues, UK and foreign-language subsidiary-right sales, an entire room of Jackie's house was by this time taken up with storage. I think it was Alex who suggested adding an ordering section to the site to see if we could sell some of them. I thought it was a good idea and told him to go ahead, adding in a fit of magnanimity that he could keep any proceeds as his "fee" for all the project work. He did quite well out of it, as things happened, getting orders from all over the world, not infrequently topping $100—not bad for a high schooler in the late '90s, before the dollar started turning into used bus tickets. Some people reading this might have been following the site long enough to remember "Mr. Toad's Book Ordering Page." That had been Alex's nickname since babyhood, owing to a slight tendency to pudginess not uncommon in early years, which he had clung to proudly ever since.
We began by keeping the ordering process simple, accepting just checks and money orders. But it wasn't long before requests started coming in from readers for us to add online electronic capability too. The site had been steadily growing in size and complexity, and since I had not really made the time to keep up with developments and trends in the computer world since leaving DEC in 1979—writing, family issues, and a recurring compulsion to mess around with old houses adds up to a pretty much full-time commitment—it was becoming apparent that just maintaining the site, never mind adding more to it, involved more than we had bargained for.
Fortunately, the situation was ameliorated by the appearance on the scene at around this time of one Tim Gleason, in Connecticut. Tim's name began appearing in the reader e-mails, and our ensuing exchanges grew to a regular correspondence. An ex-Vietnam-era Marine, he had gone on to become a computer engineer, working also for DEC in Maynard, Massachusetts, it turned out, in the same years that I had been based there and at Framingham. Afterward he had spent time with Data General, and eventually set up his own software consultancy. From starting out by helping Alex with some of the technicalities, Tim was drawn progressively deeper into our Web-site dealings and today functions as the regular site administrator—as well as keeping up pressure on me, as a matter of professional pride, to do things like upgrade from Windows 95 to 98 long after the rest of the world had already gone to XP or whatever.
Taking all considerations into account, we decided that, to consolidate and clean up the various layers of Alex's experimenting that the site now embodied, add the online ordering that readers were asking for, and streamline the business of maintenance and some further enhancements that we had in mind, the time had come to transfer everything over to being database-driven. Although Alex had created several small, special-purpose databases, converting a system of the mix and size that the site had become would have been asking a bit much. So we started shopping around to see what utilities for this kind of thing might be available commercially. Software had long been a peeve of mine. So much of what I'd come across seemed to have been inspired conceptually by the designer's knowledge of the inner workings, rather than approached from the viewpoint of a user seeing the outside. (When I wrote technical sales manuals for DEC, I used to collect comments on the draft from the secretaries who would be using the product, not from the engineers who knew how it worked.) Just about everything we looked at had something about it that made it no good for what we wanted. The standard choices for adding the shipping cost to an order, for example, were based either on the number of line items or the total order value, neither of which was much use for a mixed consignment of hardback and paperback books. It was astounding how often the program would accept only addresses conforming to the standard U.S. format. (Try force-fitting a few addresses from, say, Germany or Japan.) I grumbled that Amazon.com seemed to be able to deal with everything in a comprehensive and flexible manner. True, I was told—but they probably paid five or six million dollars for it. So we resigned ourselves to probably having to draw up our own specification and putting it out to be specially written. A somewhat less ambitious undertaking than Amazon's, no doubt; but we were only talking about listing my titles, after all.
This was where life produced one of those learning experiences that come about from sallying forth blissfully into a realm of which one has no prior experience and naivety is all but total, where the most that can be hoped for is to come out of it a bit the wiser with the gain of something that might stick. That expression comes to mind of confidence being what you feel when you don't really understand the situation. Word of our needs had propagated around, and brought a stream of offers to help from various quarters, with the general gist that playing a part in producing Jim Hogan's new web site would be payment enough in return for the books that people said they had enjoyed over the years. Well, this sounded like the kind of thing it would be foolish to refuse. Buoyed by the assurances that I was dealing with professionals who would polish something like this off in their lunch hours and breaks, I told Alex to retire Mr. Toad's page and posted an announcement that the new site with its expanded ordering capability would be up in a matter of a few weeks. That must have been around 1999 or 2000. Three or four years were to go by before we saw my books being offered for sale via the Web site again.
I'm not saying that the volunteers didn't mean well. But I should have kept in mind something that I had learned in my experiences of renovating old houses, and that was to be suspicious of self-promotion and people who tell you what great work they do. The ones who really do good work just do it and let it speak for itself. Some that we tried to deal with were unable even to grasp what we wanted. Others rushed in with commendable enthusiasm, only to founder when it became plain that they didn't know as much as they thought they did, and a number of dialogues that were going in circles had to be diplomatically ended. A recurring pattern that I noticed here, for the benefit of anyone interested in human psychological traits, was a seeming inability to simply accept being in over one's head, admit it, and retire gracefully—which would have been respected, and the effort nevertheless appreciated. Instead, what happened was that some reason would be given for putting back the date that had been estimated, and this would turn into a steady succession of excuses in which we were always another month away. As they say, you get what you pay for. Tim had always been skeptical of this being a way to get worthwhile results, but having expressed his view, didn't see it as his place to be telling me what to do on my own site. Maybe he'd been in the business long enough to know that letting people find out the hard way is the probably only way they'll learn. Anyway, it gradually became clear to all that this wasn't going to get us anywhere, and so we went back to our original position of accepting that the way to go was to put the job out commercially to professionals.
Our thought was to tackle the proposed changes in two phases. First, we would keep the existing site as it was and link it to a separate shopping-cart facility that might be on the same server or elsewhere. Once that was working, we would upgrade the original site to be database-driven as planned. An attraction of this approach was that by focusing initially on the shopping cart, we would restore a book-ordering capability in minimum time. I checked out ads and blurbs, sought recommendations, and ended up talking to an outfit on the West Coast that had supplied the shopping-cart software for a number of online order operations. We got a written quote outlining the work, setting out a payment schedule, and giving time estimates for the milestones. All very impressive. I okayed the deal and sent a check for the down payment. Nothing could go wrong this time, right? Oh, boy.
I still suffer from flashbacks to the horror story that followed, which makes it difficult to recount coherently. A warning bell should perhaps have sounded when the head of the company—let's call him J—said that things would go more smoothly if we transferred the site from its present server to theirs, so that everything could be hosted in the same place. There was no real need for this, but I could see nothing wrong with the suggestion at the time and authorized the transfer of my domain name accordingly. A firm stipulation of the arrangement was that the existing site was not to be changed in any way. It would be reproduced in its existing form and the new order page and shopping cart simply added to it. The JPH site had been written to be transportable without modification, and there should have been no problem in getting it up and running on the new host virtually immediately upon loading.
Several days later, however, attempts to access www.jamesphogan.com at the new site were still not working. Then I learned that J had asked the original hosting company to keep their version running for a further two weeks, which they agreed to do. Still oblivious to the undertones that this should have signaled, I put the delay down to a touch of the preliminary overoptimism that often characterizes these situations, and reimmersed myself in the book that I was writing.
A month later, the site still wasn't functioning. E-mails from readers were piling up, asking what was going on. J's people were concentrating on setting up the shopping cart, seemingly indifferent to the fact that the site that the cart was supposed to attach to wasn't working. A second warning should have rung when they kept asking for the weight of each catalog item rounded up to the nearest pound, for their software to calculate shipping costs. This didn't make any sense. A typical paperback might weigh seven or eight ounces. For a package of, say, five books, rounding each one up separately would produce an absurdly inaccurate overall weight. Rounding should be done afterward, on the total. In any case, post-office rates are figured to the nearest ounce, not pound. Besides which, we had stated from the beginning that we had our own formula for calculating shipping, tailored to the way we worked, and so their software that calculated post-office rates wasn't needed. But nothing made any difference. The same questions kept coming back, as if none of the previous correspondence or conversations had taken place.
When I finally brought the matter up with J, it turned out that he was under the impression that the site was working, and hadn't even realized there was a problem! Only then did the full ghastly scale of the incompetence that we were up against begin to reveal itself. Yes, these people had implemented online ordering sites before. But they possessed no concept as to any other purpose that a Web site might serve. Web sites were for selling stuff. Period. When J said he thought the site was working, what he meant was that the home page came up okay when he entered the URL. But none of the links from the home page went anywhere. J was unsure where else links needed to go, other than to the shopping cart that his people were working on. We described the other pages of the site—information on my books, new events and releases, Bulletin Board topics . . . He remained nonplused. Why would anyone need that kind of stuff on a Web site? Look, don't worry yourself thinking about it, we told him. Just get it done, okay? There would be no further discussion concerning other aspects until the basic original site was reproduced, up, and working. It seemed straightforward enough. All they had to do was follow what was there, in front of them.
A week later, nothing had changed. Tim couldn't understand it, since the original site should simply have been loaded and running in minutes. If J's people couldn't fix it on their own host, he would do it himself; but he would need the appropriate access codes to their server. His requests for the codes were not answered. E-mails to J were bouncing with the message that his mailbox was full. I sent a letter to him and his head programmer, copies by mail, giving a seven-day deadline for the situation to be cleared up, otherwise I would consider the order canceled and expect a refund of the amount paid. Jackie also tracked J down on the phone, just to be sure that he understood. He assured us that the problem would be fixed by the deadline I had given.
It wasn't, but it would be by the following day—in any case, not later than noon of the day following that. The time passed. No change. I called J to demand an explanation. He sounded surprised. Everything was fine, wasn't it? No, it wasn't. He brought the URL up on his machine while we were talking and insisted defiantly that it was working. Astoundingly, all he had looked at and checked was the home page. He still didn't grasp that this was not the complete Web site. It was as if none of the e-mails, letters, and phone conversations of the previous few weeks had ever happened. So even at this stage, his company was not yet in a position even to commence the work that it had contracted to do. I wrote a letter formally canceling the whole thing and sent it by certified mail, again with e-mailed copies. It was subsequently returned by the post office, marked "Refused."
The day after I sent the letter, J called me to insist again that the site was working, and if I was having problems it had to be something on my machine or out in the Internet. Attempts to explain yet again were futile. He wouldn't listen, but talked incessantly about the virtues of his shopping cart. I reaffirmed that the deal was canceled and ended the conversation. For the rest of the day, J went into a round of calling everybody remotely connected with the project—Alex; Jackie; Mark Luljak, another consultant friend of mine who was by now involved; Tim—and delivering the same rambling monologue, even to Tim's wife, who had simply picked up the phone and knew nothing about the affair.
The fact that the order was canceled didn't deter J and his company, who carried on working to fix what they had been saying for weeks didn't need fixing. By "fix," it turned out that they meant tearing the Web site apart and rewriting it to try and make it work on their server—never mind that this wouldn't have been necessary for anyone who knew what they were doing, and that it flatly violated the stipulation made from the beginning that the site wasn't to be altered. This would have been bad enough if what they were "fixing" was an imaged copy of the site running as a development system, which would have been standard system-engineering practice—you run the new system in parallel until it's clean, before you phase out the old one. But that wasn't what they were doing. They were tearing apart the live site, to which my domain name had been transferred—online, publicly, before the eyes of the world! Mark sent me an agonized e-mail describing how he had been watching them online for several hours, taking www.jamesphogan.com apart before his eyes, not fixing it, but wrecking it.
Since nothing we said was being heeded, the only course left was to transfer the domain name back to the original hosting company and restore the original site as it had been from backup files that Tim had kept. Normal policy for the registry where domain names are filed required the domain-name owner—that was me—to instruct the present hosting company—J & Co.—to initiate the transfer back, and so I called J accordingly. He at once launched into his spiel of claiming that all was as good as fixed. I stopped him to say that was no longer an issue and told him I wanted my domain name transferred back to its original host. Would he please initiate it? He began arguing. I cut him off to state my request again. This happened several times before I said there was nothing else to talk about and hung up the phone. It should be stressed here that he had no legal right to hang onto what was my property after I had instructed him to relinquish it. It gets even more unreal. That evening, J called Jackie—I had nothing further to say to him—and asserted that the problem was fixed. She walked him through some of the links on the home page that didn't go anywhere. But he still couldn't get it, and spent an hour and a half—she assured me she wasn't exaggerating—talking nonstop about irrelevancies after she gave up trying to communicate.
By the next day, it was plain that J was not complying. I called him and asked for the name of his company's attorney. He began again the same line that we had all heard over and over—like a tape being replayed. The exchange went something like:
"I haven't called to discuss anything. I'm asking for the name of your attorney. Are you refusing to give it to me?"
"There's nothing wrong with the system. Our shopping cart is the—"
"Please, shut up. Will you, or will you not give me the name of your attorney?"
"I want to talk to you first."
"You are impossible to talk to. Everyone who's tried has given up. You won't listen. Are you refusing to tell me who your company's attorney is?"
"I'm not refusing. But I'm going to tell you first that—"
"Will you shut up! I have clearly requested that my domain name be returned to its previous host. Will you comply, yes or no?"
"Huh, well, I can write books too. There's nothing wrong with the site. I just need to prove to you that we can—"
I hung up. Tim and Mark both called J to emphasize the seriousness of his attitude from a legal standpoint. Mark told me wearily that after two hours on the phone with J and two of his programmers, J still seemed unconnected with reality and unaware of the difference between the home page to my Web site and the rest of it. The upshot was that we called the people at the registry direct and described how my Web site was effectively being hijacked. Although it went against their normal protocol, they agreed to transfer the domain name back to the original host. Before the end of the day all was up and running once more, just as it had been two months before.
Alex finally did the job himself, developing an order page built on a database that offered our old mail-order choices as per Mr. Toad's Page, with the addition of a PayPal option. We called it the "ManyWorlds" order catalog, added to the still undatabased original site. My youngest daughter, Tina, in California, took on the job of handling the order processing. It has proved quite popular. More recently, Tim added a separate "Heretics' Bookstore" section, listing titles mentioned in some of the Bulletin Board postings, along with others of general interest or that aren't always well-known or easy to find, usually concerning controversial scientific topics that I sometimes get into.
I never did get the money back from J. I talked to several lawyers in Florida, but none of them were interested in handling it. When I tried the small-claims court, I was told that a claim needed to be filed in California. So I took it up with an attorney in Los Angeles, recommended by a mutual friend who described him as specializing in computer-related issues, but after a lengthy exchange of e-mails and phone calls, it became obvious that he was all talk and would never get around to actually doing anything. Fortunately, I had pinned him down to agreeing to a contingency basis with no retainer up front, which at least meant I wasn't sending more good money after bad—and perhaps explains the lack of luster. On the last occasion that I talked to him he brought us back full circle by suggesting that I should take it up through the courts in Florida. I'm told that Los Angeles has more lawyers than the whole of Japan. (Q. How many lawyers does it take to roof a house? A. It depends how thin you slice them.)
Alex moved on to college in Orlando, from there went to work in Boston for a year, and then moved back to Orlando again as a 3-D graphics programmer. With a demanding work schedule, a girlfriend, and things like apartment matters to contend with as part of those commitments that impose themselves in the course of getting a life of one's own, it became evident that expecting him to take on in addition the further plans that we had talked about over the years wouldn't be realistic. Nevertheless, by the time this gets to print, it might be that the full databased Web site along with its ordering system might have become a reality. I sold the two-apartment house in Bray eventually (another story), and moved to Sligo in northwest Ireland, on the coast between Galway and Donegal. A pair of local software designers in the town, Richard Mulligan and Declan Glynn, are at present (March 2005) working on it. As further enhancements, we'll be introducing a discussion-thread capability, which a number of readers have asked for, and a comprehensive search-and-index facility, which should make everything on the site more accessible. When we met yesterday for a review meeting in McGarrigle's Pub in Sligo center, things were looking promising. Dare I say it? We might see the final product up and running in a matter of weeks now.
Meanwhile, a few selected items that have appeared on www.jamesphogan.com over the years are included through this book to give an idea of the kinds of thing that get posted there. Maybe a sampling will induce some who haven't tried it yet to visit the site itself. And who knows? If they stop by the ManyWorlds bookstore while they're at it, we might even recover a little of what's gone into finally making it all happen.