Strange (But Cool!) Web Page Design Tool: StrangeBanana
On Leonard Richardson's Crummy: The Site we heard about StrangeBanana. StrangeBanana generates random Web page designs, a new one each time the page is loaded, which visitors are free to take and use on their own sites. Now I've looked at a LOT of Web sites, and I can tell you that even the bad pages produced by StrangeBanana look better than about 60% of the pages I have seen! Take a look; you might see a design you really like--but if you do, grab it, because you won't see it again!

New Naval Academy alumni blog
For several years new, I have maintained a Web site, originally named It's Not Shipmate but later renamed Homeport, and a mailing list for Alumni of the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. A while back, the server was hacked (to run some bozo's IRC bots - boy do I hate IRC...) and as a result, subsequently crashed. I had a great deal of difficulty reconstituting it, and I still have not been able to get the mailing list, usna-alumni, back up and running. I did get the Web site going again (homeport.usnaweb.org) and I decided it was time to bring a feature of the 21st century into one section of the site, a moribund online 'zine called Bancroft Echoes. So I rebuilt the site, bancroftechoes.usnaweb.org, with a blog at the core. (Hey, I'm paying for Blogger Pro so I might as well use if as many places as I can.) Now I just have to get fellow alumni to sign up to be authors on the site. I will get the mailing list reconstituted but I think a public voice for alumni can be of real value as well, and that is my intent (and always has been) for Bancroft Echoes. (I also added comments to my own blog that you are reading now.)