Steve's Website

Welcome to Steve's Website

The World Wide Web is a benign place to demonstrate some of one's eccentricities. My interests are varied and range from exploring by armchair the mythical retirement farm of Sherlock Holmes to genealogical studies of my family to local history.

No ads. No commercials. My website is strictly a personal site. It really should have three different domain names, but it doesn't. It was first launched back in 1995 with the basic three sites that you see today. Each of the sub-sites have their own navigation, but there is sitemap for everything on spicerweb.org.

The Miller Beach Pages are primarily about the local community that I live in. A neighborhood of Gary, Indiana on the beach at the south end of Lake Michigan.

The Chanute Pages came about as a result of the 100 centennial celebration of Octave Chanute's aeronautical experiments on the beaches of Miller. Miller was not a part of Gary in 1896. Gary didn't exist. Chanute a retired civil engineer living in Chicago who knew more about what had been done around the world in the way of discovering human flight. He came up with the idea of the bi-plane wing in 1896: the design that the Wright Brothers used for their first flyer.

The image to the left is the banner to my genealogy page. Genealogy and history has been a hobby of mine since I bought a computer back in 1993, but there are other pages as well that reflect my interest in books and in history. Hopefully I will be developing those to a greater extent, but for the time being they are the Russell-Holmes Atlas and a little article that I wrote about the Oshkosh Woodworkers Strike of 1898.

I hope you enjoy these pages and find them useful. Check out the site map page for a full look.

As an added note, these pages were first created using Microsoft's Front Page, the program professional webmasters love to hate. I've used Front Page until 2007, when I've competely redone the pages into the asp.net framework and cascading style sheets using Visual Web Developer Express. Microsoft is abandoning Front Page. They, and the World Wide Web Consortium, are also making it harder for non-professionals to do websites, in my humble opinion. There are bound to be some glitches on these pages. I've tested them out using IE7, IE6 and Safari3 for Windows but I really don't know how they will display in other browsers. I'm not a professional, just an "enthusiast", so I apologize in advance to other browser users who have difficutlty with the rendering.