From 1996-1998, Dwight Walker was involved with the Australian Society of Indexer's (AusSI) Web Indexing Prize (now the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers) with Maureen Henninger of UNSW and Kerry Webb from ALIA. This went on for several years. Dwight went to the American Society of Indexer's Seattle conference in 1998 to share his insights. He also ran about 6 months of online training with US, Canadian and UK students. Those notes later were sold to several corporations and individuals in Australia.
Dwight wrote several incisive articles on Web indexing which were published in The Indexer (UK), LASIE (State Library of NSW), Online Currents and 'Beyond Book Indexing' (American Society of Indexers) to educate indexers who were used to back-of-book indexing to stretch the envelope and try to get their heads around HTML, meta data and XML. This led to the ASI starting a Web indexing group which later became a Yahoo! Group.
From May 2007, we decided that all the work we had published in The Indexer will be published online on The Indexer's site as a PDF 2 years after publication for personal use only. We decided to do this as we were working as a volunteer in 1997-1998 for Australian Society of Indexers as Newsletter Editor, Webmaster, Web Indexing Judge and corresponding editor for The Indexer so the Society seems to have taken over ownership over anything I contributed. We have written off substantial losses we suffered when we were starting up back in 1998 due to content we produced being used for free over in USA by other businesses which basically destroyed our incentive to invest in this area. All publications now go through our private company WWWalker Web Development Pty Ltd. We decided to get out of Web indexing and leave the industry and give up on this area. We will try and get over the bitterness we had as it destroyed our life for 9 years and lost us so much money. Publishing on the Internet is a risky business and gives very low returns in the long term and destroys intellectual property wholesale. Short term our writings opened opportunities such as visiting the American Society of Indexers Conference in Seattle, USA in 1998 and networking with indexers in USA and UK but this produced very little value for us in the long term due to all the copying and wanting to get information for free from us by other indexers and Web developers worldwide which ate away any money we could make. Now as the knowledge from our articles in The Indexer will be free, others may benefit more than if we locked them away to protect them.
In 1996-98, Dwight, as AusSI Webmaster and Newsletter editor, helped bundle and distribute a group of tools he dubbed WEBIX (Weblinkr for Windows by Jon Jermey and INDTOHTM for DOS by Tim Craven plus Netscape and notes on Web indexing). The indexing programs are very similar in output but give different ways of achieving the same goal - a Web index. Dwight had the vision of indexing the Web and he combined these tools to further research and education into Web indexing through the Web Indexing Prize he helped start with AusSI. Dwight Walker later designed his own version of WEBIX which is still to be released.
From 1996 or so, Dwight Walker built the first Sydney Linux Users Group Website. He indexed the HOW-TOs as a gesture. In 1998, he also created a mini online course for US customers seeking to learn Linux skills online. He also attended CALU at Monash University in 2000.
In 2002, Dwight Walker contributed Perl code to integrate password login of a portal with wwwboard to stop spammers, available under GPL. No-one ever used it apart from our customer but there you are.
In July-September 2005, Dwight Walker used Telstra CDMA Minimax in Orange NSW in a tin shed to run his business as he had no phone line. In November 2006, he attempted to create on his own the Orange Wireless Network, a community project to get a wifi network up and running. He spent about a month creating a portal out of his own pocket for the Orange area using Google Maps and PHP/MySQL to locate points on a map, work out the distance between them and the azimuth needed to point them at each other to create a point-to-point wifi network. This involved Web services and XML integration of maps, latitude/longitude tables and map overlays for location-based services such as chat and gaming. He researched latitude/longitude by getting Orange City Council survey maps and data. Long-distance links over 12km were anticipated to link up all the outlying areas of Orange with a low-cost wifi network but this was knocked on the head due to 3m height restrictions on antennas in Orange City. Cabonne Shire only had a 10m restriction on antenna height but was further out of town to integrate. No momentum was achieved so the project was moth-balled in December 2006 till a better time or place and a more viable situation re startup costs and high expectations of consumers.
Since December 2006, we have used the wireless database to plot areas all over Australia, South Pacific, Europe, North America and the Middle East using Google Maps maps and satellite pictures - very useful technology used solely by us now to plan logistics and routing. We have also started mapping software development areas of our business to capitalise on location-based services that wireless and Google Maps have given us an opportunity to develop.
So the investment in wireless database technology did not go to waste. We just used it ourselves and benefited from it despite local apathy. In fact going wider after the initial flop made us realise how powerful this technology was! Why reserve it just for the local people who are generally very computer illiterate and apathetic? Why not use it for the whole world? Australia is not on its own. It has to be connected via the Internet to the rest of the world. Here is how I can do it: use the long arm of Google and the Internet to reach out and connect and make products that meet needs the world over.
Since March 2007, we have explored using broadband to do computer work more efficiently and cheaply. Down one broadband connection, we can contact and talk to the customer about the problem and then remedy technical problems or update Websites online using Skype VoIP calls, FTP, chat and special remote assistance software. It has proved a very efficient way to do business in remote country areas as we can service within minutes anyone who is online without high phone costs or having to travel to the location. This is quite a revolution for our business which has been cut-off in Orange for over a year now. The only downside is the benefits only flow to those who use broadband which limits it to enthusiasts or other small businesses both in Australia and overseas.
In May 2007, we found this does not help if there is a hardware problem like a cable not being pushed in properly into the back of a PC's network adaptor in which case we will visit the site and do the physical troubleshooting.