Apple II Bits

Perform a Google search containing “Apple” and “history”, and one of the top results will be the Apple II History online museum. Maintained by Dr. Steve Weyhrich, the site’s content originated in 1991 as part of the newsletter of the Metro Apple Computer Hobbyists (MACH) User Group in Omaha, Nebraska. With Steve’s permission, an early Web user compiled his articles into an online site in 1994, which Steve adopted and redesigned using Adobe GoLive in 2001. During that time and since, Steve has continued to maintain the site, though a few sections became outdated and no major changes have occurred.

There’s more to Steve than the Apple II, though. When Steve felt motivated to build a Web site for one of his other passions, I encouraged him to use the WordPress content management system. Developing his new site was a learning experience for both of us, as he found himself with needs I’d never encountered and questions I didn’t anticipate. We shared the discoveries we made in trying new features and plugins.

Enthusiasm for WordPress proves contagious. When I first installed WordPress to launch Showbits, it took me about a year before I realized I needed to bring my older site, Gamebits, into this modern blog publishing platform. Steve experienced a similar acclimation, and after a year of using WordPress, he undertook to convert Apple II History. After several months, his work was ready to be unveiled at KansasFest 2010:

Besides being the first major redesign to the site in nearly a decade and being immensely more attractive and navigable, the site has several new features. The homepage has a blog (with RSS feed!) that chronicles changes and additions to the site, and photo galleries use the latest AJAX interfaces for dynamic pop-ups and the like. Most important, while adapting the site’s 111 pages, Steve took the time to update much of the content, changing items that were in the present tense a decade ago to the past, and adding new material made available to him since the site’s founding. This wealth of knowledge is offered under Creative Commons, encouraging the use, reference, and distribution of this valuable resource.

Apple II HIstory is one of a growing number of Apple II Web sites that use WordPress. Syndicomm is also a recent convert, joining the ranks of A2Central.com, Juiced.GS, 6502 Lane, Bluer White, The Lost Classics Project, and A2Unplugged. I’m a fan of the software myself and have used it in conjunction with Spectrum scripts I’ve written, making it one of the most Apple II-compatible CMSs available.

Apple may have abandoned our computer almost twenty years ago, but our community has allowed neither it nor its rich lore to gather dust. Thanks to the dedication of historians like Steve Weyhrich, our history is more detailed and more accessible than ever before. I encourage you to visit his site and lose yourself in the annals of time he has documented and made available for our benefit.

With the latest issue of Juiced.GS now in the mail, it’s only a matter of time before someone asks if a PDF version is available. The staff and I continue to explore ways to make our magazine’s content available online — but for the latest news and reviews, it’s hard to justify establishing a presence in a medium where we’d compete with the excellent A2Central.com.

Just as Juiced.GS is primarily a feature-driven publication with a smattering of news, A2Central.com, run by Sean Fahey, focuses on daily news updates with the occasional longer piece. In the latter category, its most recent offering is a series by site founder Eric Shepherd:

Over the coming weeks (or maybe months or even years), I’ll be posting a series of articles introducing you to the glorious, glamorous world of assembly language programming for the 6502 series of microprocessors. While, sure, there are plenty of other languages out there, and in this day and age, assembly is something of a line of last resort among “modern” computer programmers, on the Apple II, assembly remains the optimal way to build software for the best possible performance.

Sheppy, who is the former publisher of Juiced.GS and still a regular columnist for that print publication, enjoys several advantages by writing the above series for A2Central.com. He can write at his own pace instead of a quarterly one, and at any length he likes instead of trying to fill a page. He can also make his content as accessible or esoteric as he wants, whereas Juiced.GS, which publishes several programming-related tutorials, is nonetheless more often aimed at the consumer.

The only downside to Sheppy’s series is that it’s published in a chronological blog format powered by WordPress. As such, as more news is reported, his posts will scroll off the homepage, with no tags or links from new installments to prior ones. One can choose to filter content by programming, but then you’ll also be presented with news about new Apple II utilities.

I expressed this concern to site administrator Tony Diaz, and he quickly implemented my suggested solution: filtering by author. It’s now easy to access <a href=”http://a2central.com/author/EricShepherd/” title=”A2Central.com – Your total source for Apple II computing. ” Eric Shepherd”>an archive of all content written by Sheppy in reverse chronological order. Just scroll back to the series’ start on June 18th, 2010, and you can find all his entries in this tutorial. Thanks, Tony!

The impact of A2Central.com’s newest feature is measurable, as it’s already inspired former HackFest winner Peter Neubauer to offer his own complementary article. Just as he wrote that winning entry in Macrosoft, Peter’s tutorial shows how to write HELLO WORLD using the Mindcraft Assembler.

You can meet Peter, Tony, and Sean at this month’s KansasFest, or read about the event at A2Central.com, courtesy the live reporting of Sean, Andy Molloy, and Mike Maginnis.