This is an attempt at providing a history and timeline for the creation and update of my Tcl Web Pages and various other miscellaneous items.
In 1991 (I think it was ) I attended an X Conference in Boston where John Ousterhout presented a tutorial on Tcl and his progress on Tk at that stage (It didn't have Text widgets and he was thinking about adding canvas). I thought the idea of a global embedded scripting Language for widespread use was interesting so on my return I decided to accumulate some information about it for my own use.
I was intending to accumulate a FAQ but it turned out there was already one at Ohio State University (though it was difficult to persistently access - I was in the UK at the time). I decided to mirror this for my own and anyone elses localish use and reference the man pages (still as text) from a Web page, first for internal use then at our (then) external access Web site at http://www.x.co.uk/of_interest/tcl/Tcl.html.
I started following the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup and storing refs to links and tidbits as they flowed past. At the same time the archive site at alcatel (at that point) began to accumulate information and it became indexed and referenced by Wade Holsts excellent (and so far unsurpassed) HyperTcl reference. It seemed stupid to duplicate that so I switched slightly to referencing only info separate from that site and providing HTML versions of the Tcl and Tk pages (which I converted on an ad-hoc basis from the distribution pages via a series of sed and shell scripts and some judicious hand editing - a frightful process - I was extremely happy when Tom Davis and then The Entropy Liberation Front automated this properly).
In 1994 I moved from Cambridge in the UK to Santa Cruz (in the US). For a time I was able to maintain and update the Web pages from California but this eventually proved untenable for doing convenient updates and in 1995 I managed to obtain some space hung off of The Santa Cruz Operations corporate Web site at http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html . That move was a trifle painful since the Cambridge Web site still existed and had been referenced from elsewhere (not so bad since I eventually got it to re reference the newer CA site) - unfortuantely it had also been copied which meant an immediate coherency problem. The Cambridge site ceased being maintained and moved around a few times before disappearing altogether - some copies must still exist somewhere on the Web (presumably in Europe geographically) as I still get occasional mail notifying me of pieces being out of date.
When I left the UK the Tcl pages were responsible for about 50% of the Hits on that Web site (early days, small site). Currently it seems they run between 2% and 5% of the hits on the Sco site.
Basically I cull information and links from the newsgroup and my own
research (Web Surfing, Reading and the occasionally generated or
expanded document) and update a local copy of my page which
then gets replicated (using expect) out to the external access site
(this is actually itself staged to so the process takes about a day
from when I change it to when its externally viewable).
Various folks send email about problems and links which also get added.
The regularity of this happening varies with my workload, the time of year (winter is bad) and how guilty I'm feeling about accumulation of links I've stored but not added. Its very much a background "as-and-when" process.
As new distributions come out I HTMLize the release notes and perhaps the release announcement and convert the man pages (Tcl and Tk) - I decided I can't keep up with all the extensions. Periodically I also replicate (slurp down and slightly post process) the FAQ's from the canonical FAQ sites to resync my site and usually right after that bundle the lot up as a tarball that gets dropped onto ftp.neosoft.com/pub/tcl/sorted/info:
I've been very lax in that last few years about doing the updates to neosoft in a timely manner (as you can see by the date of the last update) - mea culpa.
If anyone has need of a Web site for publishing current or archive Tcl information. I'm quite happy to store and reference reasonable sized pieces off of here. Just send me email.
I'd like to clarify that I'm responsible personally for the design, layout, content, tone, attitude, creation and general maintenance of these Tcl Web pages - apart from allowing me use of this area of the Web (and employing me) SCO has no direct or implied association, responsibility, authority, endorsement or promotion (or not) of anything here or referenced from here.
To that end feel please feel free to use, copy, reference, modify, duplicate, aggregate with something else, enhance in any way, all or any part of these pages for any purpose whatsoever with or without fee in any way that pleases you to do so mediated only by any sense of honour, fairness and honesty you may possess.
See also COPYING