Full Name: Joe Burns

Age: 36 (9/15)

Height: 6' 4" (no, really)

Weight: 225

Eyes: Two. Both brown.

Spouse: Just one. Her name is Tammy. She's a Pharmaceutical Rep. and runs StreetArtist.com

Job: Assistant Professor of Communications at Southeastern Louisiana University .

Kids: Not a chance.

Pets: Two Cats; Mardi and Chloe. (Stimpy & Fido died)

Interests: I write books. Not just HTML, but also fiction. Nothing's been published yet. I have a couple of good ones too. I also like to watch Win Ben Stein's Money.

Turn Ons: Taco Bell, Mexico, Snorkling, my Wife.

Turn Offs: People who don't use coasters.

Sign: Virgo

Favorite Color: Green

Favorite Food: Southern pork BBQ and vinegar slaw. (The best is in Huntsville, AL just off the main drag past the mall. Get off and turn left. There's a big, pink, plastic pig on the roof.)

Favorite Music: Van Halen, The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Any Classical Guitar.

Favorite Member of the Royal Family: Edward

      Around 1992, when the World Wide Web was still something most people had never heard about. A new browser called Netscape 1.0 had come out and I started studying for a Ph.D. in Communications at a large university in Ohio. During the first couple of weeks of the semester, everyone wanted to get hooked up to the school's Internet server so they could send email around. I was the first to successfully attach. It was more dumb luck than skill.

      Of course, that also meant I was the first to be called when someone else couldn't seem to make their connection. After helping three or four people, somehow I was given the moniker of Computer Wizard. It was a totally groundless title, but one I wasn't willing to give up by telling the truth.

      Word spread to the computer science department of this great computer guru housed within the Communications building. They needed someone to teach a section of basic computers. I nervously accepted. Luckily it was getting to be Christmas break which meant a month's free time. I had to teach myself the computer. I traded a guy the use of his computer for a month in exchange for taking care of his cats. When I got started, however, I found I did have a knack for these fancy thinkin' boxes. I began to become consumed by what they could do.

      When school started again, the Webmaster asked if I wanted some World Wide Web space on their server. At this stage in my computer learning curve, he might as well have been speaking Lebanese. But it was free. I took it. Http://www.cs.bgsu.edu/~jburns was created that afternoon.

      I began asking anyone that seemed to have any form of computer knowledge how to go about making a Web page. Very few were willing to offer any help. It seemed that if I was going to learn this HTML language that I was going to have to teach myself.

      My first and only home page to this point existed only on a computer disc. It had clean lines and looked good. Later in the same day the page was finished, I got into a conversation with the head of the computer department who asked what I had been up to lately. I showed her my page. She asked if I would be willing to teach the HTML summer class.

      Sure.

      Once again, I had accepted a position I was completely unqualified to perform. I started looking at the source codes of World Wide Web pages, collecting, categorizing, and sub-categorizing the commands and what they did. There wasn't a chance on God's green earth I was going to remember all this, so I wrote seven tutorials covering seven basic HTML areas. The purpose was to help me remember the required commands while lecturing.

      I also collected a handful of images that all looked like little pieces of candy, what my father use to call "goodies." The name stuck. The first "HTML Goodies" page went up in June of 1994.

      I figured it couldn't hurt to register the tutorials with Webcrawler and Yahoo. I had a hard enough time learning this myself. If I could make someone else's life a little easier, all the better.

      A month went by and I received a letter from the Webmaster who had offered me the space in the first place. He was yelling, as much as one can yell in an email letter, that so many people were using my site that it was putting a strain on the server. It seemed that I had built the better mousetrap. People were coming in droves.

      The email poured in. People wrote long, emotion-filled, thank you letters telling me they were happy to have found a site that showed them HTML in a language they could understand. No one had yet taken the time to explain the language in simple English, let alone offer it on the World Wide Web. Others wrote with questions. I started answering them. Within three months of posting the pages, I was answering 20 questions a day and servicing some 50,000 people a month. And they keep coming…

      In November of 1996, the domain name htmlgoodies.com was born.

      HTML Goodies now sports over 100 tutorials and services over a million people a month. And yes, I still attempt to answer every email question personally. This book is the culmination of four years of research, hard work, and an untold number of questions from readers.

Q. Can I ask you any question?
A. Sure. Just don't bring up my tenure in the Nixon administration.

Q. Why did you put HTML Goodies site together?
A. I was bored over one Christmas break.

Q. No really.
A. Not really. Remember that this idea didn't start as a domain unto itself. It was at first a small series of icons and short tutorials a wrote to help me teach an HTML class at Bowling Green State University. I thought it would be fun to register the pages with Yahoo and Webcrawler and see what happens.

Q. What Happened?
A. Trouble. After a month or so, I got a panic email message from the webmaster. He was yelling as much as you can yell in an email note that I was shutting down the server. I got around a half million hits the first month and over 2 million a month every month after.

Q. Wow.
A. Yeah, Wow. I'm blown away.

Q. Did you write every HTML Goodies page?
A. Every word.

Q. What's with the "So You Want A something, Huh?"
A. What do you mean?

Q. Why is every page named with that same format?
A. You don't like it?

Q. I do. But why did you do it?
A. It's consistent. It's different. I like the flow of the titles. Plus they really stand out when you see them on like Yahoo. I think its funny that people have nicknamed these the HUH? tutorials. I always thought "HUH?" was a noise people made when they weren't sure about something.

Q. Me too. Do you know of any other schools, other than your own, that are using your pages?
A. I have a few letters, paper letters, from some schools. Professors at Brigham Young, Florida State, Calvin College, North Carolina at Charlotte, and a slew of high schools. Some in Canada. Oh, and a university in Australia.

Q. If someone writes you a letter, do you answer it?
A. If I can. I do hold a full time job outside of this and I can get up to 250 email messages a day just asking HTML questions.

Q. So if someone gets a letter with your name on it, it is from you.
A. Yup. The only thing that people ask that I have trouble doing is looking at their pages. I love to look at them and see what they've done but that is tough to do all the time. I look at as many as I can.

Q. So why did you create the domain "www.htmlgoodies.com"?
A. I had an extra $1000 lying around the house each month.

Q. No really.
A. Well, I did it originally because of two reasons. The first was that I needed it for a class. The second is because when I was attempting to learn HTML I had a hard time finding anything or anyone who was overly eager to help. It was frustrating. After I put these pages up, I got some of the most emotion filled letters. "Oh, thank you for helping me! And thanks for not talking to me like I'm an idiot." So I guess I wasn't alone in my quest for HTML knowledge.

Q. You do have a conversational writing style.
A. That's because I speak the tutorial out loud as I write it. Technical talk makes HTML too distant. This is too much fun to me to be dull and boring.

Q. I notice some misspellings.
A. Complain, complain. I hand you free information and you roll me around the "I" before "E" rule.

Q. Any new tutorials to come?
A. As many as I can write. I'm to the point now where I'm getting above my own head. To keep writing tutorials I might have to hire a few people to help me with actual computer programming.

Q. Will you do that?
A. Yup. I do it for me first. Then I write the tutorial for everyone else.

Q. Must be fun.
A. And time consuming.

Q. Thanks for your time.
A. It was your time too.

Q. It was just a statement.
A. So was that.

Q. Knock it off.
A. OK.