You actually want to know who I am?
Well, OK. Here are the incriminating details…
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
An Unpublished Interview With Joe Burns
Q. Why are you doing this interview?
A. Because you asked.
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 I 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.
