Eric W. Brown’s Saugus.net Page

This is a personal home page at Saugus.net, not to be confused with my regular home page or my home page at work. The longer one stays online the more home pages one acquires, each with a different purpose and flavor...

In any case, I founded Saugus.net back in early ‘98, before there were many community sites anywhere. The webmasters of the few other pre-existing Saugus related sites were encouraged to get involved, and they all did.

Saugus.net became the official Saugus web provider with the blessing of the Town Manager that April and incorporated as an independent non-profit organization on May 1, 1998. With the encouragement of the Town Manager, numerous town employees started to contribute information about their own departments, commissions, boards, committees, and authorities. Some work on their pages directly; others contribute only content.

Saugus.net’s goal was to try and get everyone to work together — government, businesses, non-profit organizations, schools, clubs, etc. to provide the best possible online experience for not just Saugonians both home and abroad, but also other people interested in our community.

Over the years Saugus.net has grown, and today it has a lot more interest outside of Saugus. Our free annual Halloween Ghost Story Writing Contest attracts authors (and readers) literally from all around the world, and our Computer Knowledgebase is used and referenced where ever computers are found. Saugus.net is no longer limited to the Web, either; it’s published a few books including the well-received A Gathering of Memories and it’s taught numerous topics (for both novices and pros) in various locations.

During all this time Saugus.net has remained a technological leader. Saugus.net has always been the ones to pioneer new technologies and provide our readers with new cutting-edge capabilities first. Saugus.net was the first one in Massachusetts to exploit the capabilities of Zope in a production environment; it was one of the first local sites to support advanced searching capabilities; it was one of the first in the state to syndicate some of its content via RSS and iCalendar syndication; it sported some “Web 2.0” features way back in the ‘90s; it was one of the first around to make heavy use of RDF / Semantic Web facilities; and it was using, promoting, and contributing to open source and free software well before they were the buzzwords that they are today. The list goes on and on... Regular Saugus.net readers know that exciting new facilities become available here first.

You may also want to check out some of my other home pages in various places, including (but not limited to):

Also, I volunteer and/or work for the following places or have worked on the following projects:

Finally, it should be mentioned that the little utility nb2txt has its home here (at least for the moment).