 PEJ - 10 years online
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On December 2001 there was something new over the Web regarding, well - Ancient History? Medieval Studies? Biblical or Oriental Studies? Frankly speaking the answer is yet to be found. Anyway, so the story goes - partly as a hobby to relax from the surmounting pressure in his doctoral studies, the webmaster decided to put online all the stuff related to the project he ran. That happened in December 2001 and by that time, the Projeto de Estudos Judaico-Helenísticos - PEJ was barely taking shape.
In those prehistorical times - quite adequately called "Web 1.0" - there was almost no integration between blogs, electronic buying shops, download or streaming music. People surfed the Web in a so-to-speak more relaxed way.
As time went by it became clear that not every website needed all the latest hype - some just needed more "information", in the archaic sense of the term. Of course, there were always the hardcore surfers - like the webmaster of the PEJ site - who wanted social networking, banking, downloading, e-reading and what else came about - all those things would soon be called "Web 2.0".
The PEJ website, that is now celebrating its first ten years online, thrived among all those novelties. Some of them were incorporated, others dropped off immediately, some others still dropped off only after quite a while. In fact this website had three "incarnations", so to pseak? the first one, with the background resembling vellum and the logo embossed, the second with a cleaner, more geometrical shape (in white and grey) and the third one, which is the current - it incorporates some css elements but is still an HTML website in its broadlines.
Back in 2001 connection speeds were paramount when designing a website - there were a load of tools to measure the connecting speeds in different modems - and even a bizarre contest for the fastest uploading site ever, the "1K Trophy" or something like that. Less was more.
Fast forward ten years and the more junior PEJ members are unlikely to know what a modem is or does. They should consider themselves lucky for that; in the WiFi or 3G age, the relevance of heavy images in a site such as ours is minimum.
But no matter how you look at it the website fulfilled its mission - and its promise - very well indeed.
To begin with, maintenance is very easy; we have almost 2 thousand pages today hosted in the site or linked to it - and the automated maintenace tools keep them all in good shape. Far easier than writing an essay.
The website also carried on with the burden of teaching - since August 2005 all classes, texts, exams etc. have been online, as far as this webmaster is concerned.
Of far greater importance was the fact that PEJ had a domain-name. This allowed countless people to contect us, share their interests, look for possibilities on supervision, or simply come to realize that there is research in Biblical-Ancient-Oriental studies in Brazil.
Last but not least, the greatest tribute to this site's practicality for the past years was involuntarily given on an English afternoon by a distinguished Arabist. Taking a look at the presentation card of the webmaster, he dutifully noted, in that umistakeble scholarly accent:
"Oh, I-I see - t-this is a quite b-big project, isn't it?"
Having said that this tribute can be finished. Just for the record, the scholar quoted above was not British but Australian.
May this website, in this format or in any modified version, live up to its expectations and may render good service for many years to come.
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