knuetter dot com - Christian

jimsauer.com

Filed Under Friends Sites Fridays, Life and living

Continuing my trek through friends’ sites, I’ll again visit one of the older sites out there.

I met Jim through work at Intuit. He and I shared a similar work ethic and also both enjoyed getting to know rock climbing a little better. He and I, along with several other Intuit folks, would head up to the mountains on a pretty regular basis trying out different climbing routes and destinations. There were several trips to Yosemite, Fresno Dome and even a few great trips down to Joshua Tree

Jim had registered the JimSauer domain early in the days of the internet, and when I first met him the site was unmaintained and used primarily for the email address. Since then, Jim has spent a good amount of time overhauling the site into a bit of a blog type interface though he built the site and its publishing capabilities from scratch.

It remains his personal site, updated with select events from his day-to-day life including some photos and interesting anecdotes about what he’s been up to. This site probably won’t be of interest to too many, but I check in from time to time since he and I don’t manage to keep up with each other as much these days. I’d love to blame the fact that he’s moved to Tucson, but I know that’s not the case. Even prior to the move we weren’t spending as much time together. It’s a combination of no longer working together, me no longer climbing, and us living 40 miles away.

But that’s not completely it. I also feel that there’s a level of difficulty (that I feel anyway) of day-to-day living and trying to keep up with so many folks from over the years. I don’t know how unique I am in that regard or whether this is just a symptom of modern living - people living farther apart and creating larger and larger networks of people.

I think this at least partially explains the success of sites like FaceBook or LinkedIn. These sites would be unnecessary in a world in which people lived in the towns in which they grew up and worked in jobs that they maintain for 20 years.

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Friends’ sites Fridays

Filed Under Friends Sites Fridays

One idea I’ve had with this site is to point out sites that friends are working on or working at, either personally or professionally.

Being in the Internet industry I work with a lot of talented and creative people who are also quite proficient in the field of web publishing and technology. It’s one of the things that inspires me to stay in the Bay Area and to stay in this industry.

When I moved to San Francisco the internet was really just taking off (this was 1995). My first job was at Intuit where I worked on the first iteration of their website Intuit.com (and specifically, QuickBooks.com). During this time I also started playing around with my own personal web site - though it was hosted under my Pacific Bell internet account so it’s long-lost.

At that time I worked with Karl, who was also playing around with his own website on the side while also working on Intuit’s web publishing systems. Karl and I also spent a lot of time rock climbing back in those days, and he put together a website to host photos from our rock climbing trips as well as share his thoughts on and experements with gear.

I learned a lot from Karl, and I’m sad that I don’t spend more time with him (or more time rock climbing). He is also one of the first friends that I had that created a website so I’ve decided to start this series of posts with his site. Even though it is long un-maintained, it’s still fun to go back and check out the photos (and how they’re integrated into the layout) as well as how he chose to handle navigation around the site (this was still early on in the days of the web).. So go ahead and take a moment and check out climerware.com. It’s not someplace that you’ll spend a lot of time, but perhaps you’ll learn something just as I did all those years ago.

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