A Brief
History
The Nearby Café
grew out of a simple personal/professional home
page that I initiated in the spring of 1995 at
the urging of Peter C. Guagenti, the webmaster
for that home page and also for the first incarnation
of the Café. That home page listed my current
activities, offered samples of recent writings
and interviews, and included a small gallery space
for portfolios by some invited guests.
The World Wide Web had
just emerged out of the Internet when that personal
home page -- titled C:
The Speed of Light -- made its debut.
I didn't know quite what to make of it, or the
Web, or even the 'Net (with the latter of which
this was my first experiment; up till then I hadn't
even tried email). But, as a writer, and the offspring
of publishers, the simple fact that I could publish
and distribute anything I wanted to present, at
low cost, without anyone's editorial oversight
save my own, had immediate appeal.
I serve on the boards of
several non-profit organizations, and support
others in less formal ways. As I fulfilled my
board duties over the next few months, and traveled
once again to Prague to teach that summer of '95,
I communicated my excitement over this new medium
to friends and colleagues at Artists Talk on Art
in New York City, The Photo Review in Philadelphia,
and the Prague House of Photography in the Czech
Republic. Few of them had much experience with
the 'Net, none with the Web, but all expressed
interest -- and asked if I coud help them get
online.
Those requests, and what
I now realize were my own lurking impulses to
work as an editor and publisher, coalesced by
the end of the summer of '95 into a proposal for
a site in which numerous content providers came
together under one roof. When I got home from
eastern Europe, I asked Peter if he could help
me construct an expanded site in which relatively
autonomous subsections -- each the equivalent
of a substantial home page for these three non-profit
organizations -- could co-exist with my own newsletter
and perhaps some other features, providing a much
broader menu for visitors.
When Peter said that he
could, so long as we changed ISPs and rented enough
cyberspace to house the material, I offered to
launch those three organizations -- Artists Talk
on Art, The Photo Review, and the Prague
House of Photography -- on the 'Net, pro bono,
as components of a new website that I would maintain
financially, manage, and edit. They accepted,
and the Café as an idea was born.
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The concept of a multi-subject
environment -- a cross between the rich complexity
of a fine café on a good night, with intricate
conversations on varied subjects going at different
tables, and a first-rate magazine or weekly arts
& culture newspaper, with its diverse features
and columns -- served as the model. We launched
it in October of 1995.
That original version of
the Café I titled The B.Y.O. Café,
for "bring your own," a familiar U.S. phrase for low-budget parties for which guests have to provide their own liquor. That seemed appropriate, since I couldn't actually serve up any coffee -- just a cyberspace version of a good place in which to drink it. It appeared at www.byocafe.com. (Note: I let that domain name's registration lapse in '97, so we had no connection to a subsequent short-lived ESL message-board site that appeared online under the same name from 2002-2004.)
Shortly after we opened the site, Peter -- at the time a nineteen-year-old whiz kid -- was hired away from me (by Paper magazine,
to create its first website), and the site lost
its webmaster. I knew nothing about website management.
For a spell, Ralph Mastrangelo replaced Peter,
helping to post some new content and refine the
site's basic design. But in mid-'96 other commitments
pulled him away too, and the site went stagnant.
It remained that way for
the next year, though I continued to identify
and gather content for the existing sections and
even to plan new ones. In the summer of 1997 I
confronted the decision as to whether I should
continue with the Café as I'd envisioned
it or instead retrench, falling back to the more
manageable project of a much smaller home page
devoted simply to my own activities and work.
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By then one of our original
content providers, The Photo Review, had
left the nest to establish its own separate website
under its own domain name. My arrangements with
the other two could have concluded at that juncture.
Yet that enticing vision of a many-faceted, polyvocal
context tugged at me. The main obstacle remained
the absence of an effective webmaster.
I couldn't afford the services
of anyone who could handle the amount of content
I wanted to include for what little I could budget
for posting it. The solution at which I arrived,
reluctantly, was that I had to learn to do it
myself. So, over the summer of '97, I studied
the basics of html and website structure and design,
elementary Photoshop, and acquired some other
necessary skills. Using them, I put the Café
through its first major overhaul, revising every
section thereof, updating and deepening the content
level of existing subsections, adding new ones
(such as Extra
Anchovies! and the Museum
of Find Arts, as well as our Op-Ed
Page), and working on its graphic design as
well -- the last with the assistance of Nina Sederholm.
I also renamed it The Nearby Café -- partly because I thought it was more memorable and more evocative, but also because our traffic at the site had become surprisingly international and I discovered, to my consternation, that the phrase B.Y.O. doesn't translate. (Europeans seemed to assume that it had some health-food reference, as in the prefix bio.) This new,
improved version of the site emerged in the fall
of 1997. Our traffic took a noticeable jump as
a result.
Over the course of the
next year I added several new components: the
Café's travel journal, Motion;
the New York Photography Calendar (in collaboration
with Tanya Murray); and En Foco Online, another
pro bono base for another non-profit. Existing
sections were variously enhanced. However, I'd
reached the limits of both my own web-design and
site-management skills and my own available time
for the project. Other commitments -- teaching
engagements, lectures and other professional responsibilities,
several new books, and a whirlwind of travel --
forced me to put the site aside once again.
So, from early 1999 until
the spring of 2001, the Café went virtually
unchanged. Even the task of maintaining the monthly
Photography Calendar with some assistance proved
impossible. And I remained painfully aware of
the site's static condition, of which occasional
complaining visitors reminded me.
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However, at the tail end
of 1999 John Alley, a teacher with web skills
who'd heard me lecture in Richmond, Virginia a
short time earlier, volunteered himself as the
site's part-time webmaster. We spent the year
2000 exchanging emails about the site, his ideas
for it, my long-term goals for it, and its reconfiguration.
Early in 2001 John began to redesign the site's
flagship component, my own newsletter, C:
The Speed of Light.
Because John works with
Adobe's GoLive! Cyberstudio, he recommended that
I learn the same program. I've taken to it easily,
and sharing the same software has both simplified
our collaboration on the site and facilitated
my own work on it. As a result, I've recommitted
myself to its development. The Café is
presently undergoing its second major overhaul.
I expect this to take much of the next year to
complete, but you can already see some of the
results.
A few of the Café's
previous components -- such as the Photography
Calendar -- have undergone significant reconfiguration.
En Foco, like The Photo Review before it,
has moved to its own domain site elsewhere on
the web, with my blessing. New subject areas and
components have been added. Old ones have had,
or will have, their content increased and, probably,
their visual style and Web-tech bells-and-whistles
levels raised. We'll achieve this as time and
energy permits.
This is probably not an
unusual narrative of the ups and downs of what's
basically a one-person website run primarily by
a self-taught web designer and site manager whose
ambitions for the site outstrip his abilities,
his time and energy, and his available funds.
Perhaps the only unusual aspect of the story is
this: Despite extended periods of partial and
even complete inertia, some of it site-wide, traffic
at this site has skyrocketed to an all-time high
that now seems like just its first plateau.
When I returned my attention
to the site in the late spring of 2001, I expected
to find that its statistics had slumped. After
all, little on it had changed for more than two
years. The web, according to the conventional
wisdom, demands continuous novelty or, at a bare
minimum, frequent change. How can it be, then,
that a site that's remained relatively home-made,
with few technical frills, and whose content stayed
the same for over two years, went from a yearly
average of 500,000 hits from 60,000 visitors in
1999 to our present total of 820,000 hits from
a quarter of a million visitors during the past
year?
I have no answer to that
question; and, unfortunately, we don't hear from
enough of our visitors to extrapolate a dependable
explanation from their responses. I have only
this hypothesis to offer:
The premise of this site,
from its elementary original form through the
present, has been that durable websites require
a foundation of solid content. As steersman of
the Café, I have placed my emphasis on
diversifying, expanding and deepening the project's
content level whenever possible. That's necessitated
choosing content that's not only worth posting
in the first place but merits maintaining online,
in archives or otherwise available permanently.
From the very beginning,
we've posted very little here that I didn't believe
deserved a long life online. That's reflected
in the fact that the bulk of what we've posted
since 1995 remains here at the site -- and that,
according to our server's statistics program,
visitors continue to access it. We've eschewed
the trivial and ephemeral, and have wagered on
the substantial. That bet seems to have paid off.
So that remains our policy:
amplifying the Café's content level is
always the first priority. The conventional wisdom
has it that surfers' attention spans are limited,
that they need graphics that bounce and skitter
and texts no larger than bite-sized; we post lengthy
essays, serious poetry and fiction, and images
that invite quiet meditation and reward prolonged
attention. That same conventional wisdom proposes
that the most attractive sites will make use of
the most cutting-edge web technologies; the Café
stays determinedly several steps behind the curve
in that regard. Those are deliberate choices I've
made.
I'd be lying if I claimed
to be producing this website purely, or even primarily,
to please myself. With it I became a publisher,
and I hope to attract an extremely wide audience.
But I've striven to make it the kind of environment
that I myself enjoy, whether in cyberspace or
in a real neighborhood café. I'm gratified
to learn that others like it as it is. I appreciate
the patience of visitors whose favorite sections
go unchanged for long spells. I do my best to
improve it when my resources allow. But I make
no apologies for it. You'll find all kinds of
good stuff here. Take a good look around. Enjoy
it. Come back regularly. We'll be here for a long,
long time, and it'll always please us to have
you with us again.
-- A. D. Coleman
Executive Director
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