Site
Map
My name is Frank Brusca and I am the creator of this
web site. About 99% of what you see here came from my fingertips.
You should know that I am a full time software designer and web site
developer. As such, creating this site was a fun little project. I
have received a lot of praise for this site, but the best acknowledgment
comes from other roadologists who share my obsession with roads in
general and Route 40 specifically.
The Beginnings
Since the late 1960's, I have been collecting chunks
of information about Route 40. During that time I had dreams about
publishing a book on the subject. I recognized that none of the information
was coherent enough to publish, so I put the idea of publishing behind
me. In the Spring of 1995 a college intern who sat in the cube next
to me at NCR told me about the web. She told me about HTML and I realized
I had found the perfect publishing medium for my Route 40 stuff.
I quickly threw about a dozen web pages together using
Notepad as my editor. Since I was an AOL member at the time (I've
long since abandoned that service), I put my simple pages on their
server. At the same time I registered my web site with AOL's Web Crawler,
Yahoo and a new service called AltaVista. I never thought my pages
would amount to anything, yet within a day or two of going live, I
started receiving e-mails from other people who were almost as obsessed
as I was. Up until that point, I thought I was the only one.
The Site Matures
Before long, I began incorporating photos into the web
site. HotDog became a favorite of mine and I stopped using Notepad
for coding. In 1996, AOL began adding a few advanced capabilities like
page counters and e-mail form processing.
More importantly, the content of the web site grew from
a handful of pages to about 200. Then the newspaper stories started.
Reporters began doing stories about the web site. I still find it amazing
that this simple little project would be so popular. To the best of
knowledge, this web site has been written up in the following newspapers
and magazine:
- USAToday
- Wilmington News Journal
- San Jose Mercury News
- San Diego Union Tribune
- Denver Post
- Acura Driver
Every once in a while I'll get a flood of e-mail from
people who have read about the web site in a newspaper article - an
article about which I had no knowledge.
The Site Really Matures
In
1998, I left AOL and acquired web service through Web2010
(now Hostcentric).
Having a real web server at my hands opened up a whole
range of possibilities. At the same time, I began tinkering
with JavaScript, PERL scripts and server side includes.
On the professional front, I was doing more and more
web-based projects. In a way this web site became a
proving ground for my coding and scripting abilities.
Following a change in jobs in late 1998,
I began using Macromedia's Dreamweaver.
I have done about 99% of my web work using this wonderful
tool.
My graphical expertise also took off
at this time. Most of the graphics and photographs on
the site were created and managed using JASC's PaintShop
Pro and Adobe's Photoshop.
All of this went into this site. I hope this gives you
an idea of how this site was developed.
Enjoy!
