here are two ways to weave a website. The easy one is a Web log. My own at http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com, suggested to me at St Petersburg's UNESCO conference a year ago on culture and computers, has a built-in programme that is largely automatic, much easier than the traditional web essay crafting. It can also link easily to a petition site, as mine does, where we have now more than 5000 signatures, on the web and physically here in the English Cemetery, to save it as a World Monument.

Weblogs are far more dynamic and trendy, but too easy for my tastes!

Ten years ago I began weaving webs, Timothy Thompson at Syracuse University in Florence teaching me html, Otfried Lieberknecht in Berlin loaning me webspace, Tony St Quintin being my consultant. Because I work with medieval manuscripts and their memory systems in colour and images I chose to use their wisdom on the web rather than reinvent the wheel, using their alternating reds and blues for later medieval texts, their reds and greens for the earlier ones. Then I acquired a set of capitals in reds and blues, which I now need to expand into greens and perhaps darker blues, for a section of this umilta website is on trauma healing with the theme of olive leaves.


The splendid Italian colleague (see also his newsletter), who did the first two alphabets, has now done one in green:


At first I used straight - and complicated - html. Then Tony St Quintin downloaded Netscape Navigator 4 for me which had an excellent web composer on it. I used that long after the programme became totally obsolete. Finally I was blocked from access to it. So recently I have rediscovered it, and it is even better than ever before, on Mozilla, now called 'Sea Monkey', which you can download for free. On 'File' in 'Sea Monkey', click on 'edit', then on 'new', then on 'composer page', and you are ready to weave your website.

Begin with your title in capitals, enlarge and bold these, and colour them. They look terrible in black and white!

WEAVING WEBSITES

Finally images. I found better than a scanner is a good digital camera. If you are taking pictures from old photographs and books then you need a trestle such as you can buy from IKEA for making a table out of two trestles and a board. Place a small board across the bottom of the trestle, the camera on the top and shoot. If the object you are photographing is glossy, like a photograph, then take its digital picture with the flash disabled, placing your apparatus in front of a window, in natural light but not sunlight. The web can cope with images in jpg and gif, not tiff.

I could not show the placement of the camera in the image below because I was using it! It is held steady along the top bar. A picture taken by hand-held camera is likely to be blurry because the hand shakes and moves a bit. The trestle doesn't. I have even taught this cheap method to professional archivists who have gone on then to digitize manuscripts at no cost.

Search WWW Search www.umilta.net

Diderot and D'Alembert in their Encyclopedie unlocked all the secrets of the trades. From their volumes you can study how to marble paper, using Irish seaweed as base upon which to sprinkle the colours to each of which is added a drop of oxgall,

 

and to bind books by hand, such as the one above on the trestle. I prefer to combine real books with e-books, handcrafts with webpages. See http://www.umilta.net/cradle.html.  For webcrafting your needs are simple, a computer, a digital camera, a trestle, webspace, an ftp programme and a web composer. The web composer is free, the trestle almost so. And your ingenuity upon which no price can be set.

I bought in Florence's Straw Market this hand-loomed linen which comes from Farfa Sabina where they still weave designs that go back millennia, to Constantinople on the Bosporus and to the land of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the cradle of our civilization from whence derived our alphabet and our designs. The hand-painted medieval and Renaissance majolica shards are those we find in our Cemetery in Florence.

You have the whole world - without any frontiers - to play with on the World Wide Web, just as did motifs in embroidery and in sculpture sweep across the globe being shared and appreciated by far-flung cultures. My essays on the Belgian Godfriend Jan van Ruusbroec caused the President of Beijing's Global Village to visit me in Florence where we spoke together for hours on culture and ecology, before she and her teenage daughter journeyed on to Groenendaal.

Bless you.