Introduction: What were BinderBabies ?
I don’t remember exactly when I started this project - 1997? - at least that’s when my earliest project files date from. In any case, it was about the time people started using rollovers in webpages. My initial intent was to learn to do just enough javascript to put a few cool rollovers on my own site, but the project quickly mushroomed well beyond that. Almost immediately, I got a bad case of the “I could”s, as in “Y’know, I could use rollovers to do other interesting stuff”. And then “I could do X with it, and then maybe Y, and then …” The “I could”s are more insidious than the “you should”s (other people telling you what to do with your project) and much harder to resist. Before long, my “Hello World” project ballooned into a complex preoccupation that consumed most of my spare time for several years. |
The project started as a simple notebook interface for some of my other stuff. But it certainly didn’t stop there: why just notebooks; why not binders for them? And then: why not a control panel to manage binders? I named the full project after that last extravagance: the BinderMinder project. As a novice programmer, I naively thought that developing the project was merely a matter of learning enough javascript to implement what looked interesting as I went along. I did indeed learn quite a bit of javascript (which stood me in good stead when I needed to learn Actionscript later) and I did indeed actually implement a large number of the ideas I thought of. But the project eventually became too unwieldy and worse, the technology remained too unstable: with every revision of javascript or the various browser implementations of javascript, the BinderMinder broke and had to be repaired. |
At some point, to have something to show something for my efforts, I spun off a smaller version of the notebook part of the project, called BinderBabies. A BinderBaby was a small notebook with tabs, navigation and so on. It was designed to display content organized into multiple branching paths, and since its pages were just html pages, it could in principle display anything that a webpage could. Moreover, since those paths and the visual appearance of the book were also controlled by html pages, a BinderBaby could be authored by anyone with the ability or means to produce html, either from scratch or with an editor. (GoLive and PageMill were becoming popular at the time, but many people still preferred to roll their own with a text editor). |
After a while, I attempted to promote the BinderBabies (to a small software company and via a website) and produced a well-received demo for an educational technology conference by presenting content – my Poincaré project – inside a BinderBaby. I also attempted to interest other groups by producing BinderBaby versions of a math journal issue and a university calendar. None of this lead anywhere, probably because, in addition to the unstable technology and coding, webpages were still too complicated for most people to produce in quantity on their own, even with the editors then available. |
Eventually, other things captured my interest and I abandoned the project. What remains are mostly some screen shots and setup files, collected and annotated here for historical/archival purposes. There are pages on
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