Comments from the webmaster
This website came to be because of my personal frustration with the very complex and massively multilayered design of the IBM support website. It started as my own personal bookmarks page. The first major value add was the power connectors page. I was constantly being asked by my peers within IBM as well as my customers about power connectors on the equipment and where to buy the IEC 309s.
I started adding additional links as people would send questions my way. My general rule of thumb was that if I got asked twice about something, I’d put up a quick link for it. If I had to build a custom document to explain something, I’d try to make it generic enough to post as submitted material.
I finally got enough people hitting my little webpage that I decided to go bigger and picked up the xseries.org domain. When I did this, I decided on a couple of key principles, which I follow to this day.
1 – keep it simple
I wanted a simple 2 layer site. The top layer is the menu, which I try to lay out in a logical manner. No graphics, nothing fancy – just a simple and quick interface. I want to be able to use my PDA or cell phone to get most or all of the information available from this site.
Ok, Excel isn’t the single best authoring tool out there, but it does give me a very simple layout.
And color coding of the buttons is my attempt to make clear what is a simple bookmark into IBM (or others’) sites vs what is unique to this site. I definitely didn’t want to claim IBM’s material as my own, nor do I want to circumvent any security or checks they have in place. I simply wanted to make it simpler to get to the information which people already know they want.
2 – no advertising
In my opinion, the .org designator indicates that this site serves a purpose and that purpose is not profit. Also, since I am using xseries in the name, I did not want to have any commercial tied to IBM or any other company.
As a result, this page costs me about $100 out of my own pocket every year, plus the time I spend on it. Seems like a small cost to me.
This does not mean I don’t post commercially created content. The folks who make the PDUs for IBM asked me to put up a document they built. That document is an informative technical document (as opposed to a marketing brochure), so I did so. I was also amused that they referenced this website during IBM’s technical training in the Fall 2005 as the best source for information on their PDUs.
I also try to keep it low maintenance. I simply don’t have time to update every piece of information on this site on a daily basis. Heck, I can’t even manage to check the email box for this site more than about once a week (that’s why your broken link emails and suggestions sometimes take awhile to resolve).
One way I have kept my time overhead low is to empower people who make submissions by giving them their own web space and ftp id (and to allow them to remain anonymous (to the public, at least) to protect the innocent). The driver and firmware list is maintained by such a person. He works his magic to create that list every week and uploads it to the site. I don’t run web counters, so I can’t prove it, but I believe that is the single most heavily used feature on this site. It is certainly the feature I personally appreciate the most. It only takes one look at it to realize that it is no small effort to keep it up to date. There is no way that would exist if this were all me.
Some of my links aren’t deep enough, even with what I have done. One example is the IBM Director links. There is so much material within IBM’s site that it is simply too overwhelming to try to shortcut all of it. So I’m sorry that I don’t maintain separate links to the docs and the downloads, to the vmm and to the UIMs, but I think that IBM does a decent job with that already, once you get to their top page for IBM Director. Could it be improved upon? I certainly think so, but I simply don’t have the time to try to maintain the 50+ links I’d estimate would be needed. So I had to make a decision to keep this site as simple as I could and settle for the link to IBM’s top page for all things IBM Director.
I have never advertised this site (beyond writing it on all of my business cards). If you know about it, it’s because of word of mouth or a lucky web search. Yet I occasionally have someone I have never met before grab me and say “YOU’RE the guy who runs xseries.org?!” I’ve gotten emails from all over the world with comments and questions. It’s truly humbling how well used this site is, considering it’s humble beginnings as a shortcuts page for me.
I have future plans as funds and facilities allow. In particular, I want to host an iso image archive for cds you can’t download, such as all of the old ServerGuide cds back to the very first one (hey, I’m still running a PC Server 315 at the house... it can be annoying chasing everything down I need to re-install NT4 on it). This will require several gigs of space and possibly annoy my current web hosting company due to bandwidth.
So, I hope you understand why I keep it so basic. I hope you agree with my principles in the operation of this site. And I hope you will come up with content you feel should be shared with others. This is a community fed site. If you are using it and benefiting from it, contribute some of your intellectual capital back to this community.
My sincere thanks to everyone. I do this out of my respect for you all.
-Doug Toth