(April 2004)

About the Website

Why darkenchanter.net?
Purpose of the Website
Description of Website
Notes on Website Accessibility

Why darkenchanter.net?

Firstly the name darkenchanter is associated with neither fantasy fiction nor fantasy role-playing games (RPGs). (Though I have read one and played the other!)

Dark Enchanter was a userid I used for computer bulletin boards (BBSs) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The name was chosen very deliberately for its symbolism. The "Enchanter" part refers to 'potential' - creative and intellectual. The "Dark" refers to a lack of illumination (it doesn't mean 'black' or 'evil'). The whole refers to an acknowledgment that I am still unilluminated and struggling to find and fulfil my potential.

Purpose of the Website

This website has been set up so that I can present the best of my fanzine "Reality Module" to a wider audience. "Reality Module" is part of ANZAPA - the Australian and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association.

I joined ANZAPA in October 1997, and this website first appeared in March 2001. So it will take a while to convert to HTML all the significant works, and upload them.

There will be dozens of essays and articles on subjects as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, sociology, the psychology of dreams, philosophy, and the social implications of technological change. And stories as well of course. You'll just have to wait for them.

I imagine this website as being like a massive folder containing printouts of works - all on different colours of A4 paper.

This website used to live at http://micom.asn.au/~mfg until MICOM shut down its Internet service. When I found out this was going to happen I bought myself a couple of domains - darkenchanter.net and mfgreen.net and arranged for boing.net to host my site. I migrated the site here on January 24th 2002. (The old site lives on in the Internet Archive and I am happy for it to remain there.)

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Description of Website

There are four types of works on this site: essays, articles, snippets & creative works.

Essays tend to be long works, usually on serious subjects.
Articles are shorter, and may be serious or non-serious in tone.
Snippets are very short indeed! They are gathered together on a page for each year, and these pages are listed among the Articles.
Creative works may be stories or poems. (These have been written over many years and have been reprinted in "Reality Module.")

An important feature of this website are the Feedback and Discussion pages. These contain feedback from people - mostly the wise souls in ANZAPA - about issues raised in the essays and articles. (The feedback pages have separate links on the Site Map.)

One innovation introduced to this website is the Embedded Note.¹

¹An Embedded Note is a note placed between horizontal rules and set between paragraphs. I have invented the Embedded Note for two reasons:

Footnotes do not work on webpages. (There is no specified page length, and hence no way of ensuring footnotes will come out at the bottom of printed webpages.)
Endnotes are very awkward to use on webpages, as it is clumsy to flip between endnotes and text on webpages. (I still feel it is appropriate to use endnotes, though, when the notes are purely bibliographic.)

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Notes on Website Accessibility

This website complies with the WC3 HTML 4.01 specification. The pages should load okay in *any browser.*

It should also be Bobby approved - and fully accessible to people using text-based or speech-based browsers. (Please email me if you have any problems.)

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Last Updated: 23 April 2004