It would have started on March 20th 2001, but then www.rongorongo.org was unattended, its webmaster struggling with a very nasty software accident. Much, much later, when things were repaired, there, in webmaster@rongorongo.org, was this unsolicited piece of mail, dated 2001/03/20, drowning in megabytes of spam, one virus, and one trojan:
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. If the Trojans had looked their gift horse in the mouth, Troy might still be standing. But there were more urgent things to do than look into the mouth of this gift horse, and so it was left standing there, outside the walls. The matter was investigated when leisure allowed; Big Chalk indeed appeared to be a genuinely educational site. No Achaeans hiding in this horse's flanks, it seemed. Somewhere else on the web, a nice-looking award with a trophy in front of a spiderweb caught the eye, leading to the International Assocation of Webmasters and Designers, a professional-sounding outfit. Why not apply and see? And it was awarded. Suddenly, it all seemed too easy. This led to finding out about website awards. To quote Rainer Klein, Webmaster, of Webmaster Central Awards:
To repeat the raison d'être of rongorongo.org:
To be effective, rongorongo.org must be visited. If website awards help, forget the bauble aspect, remember the benefits. The trap, however, lay in applying for give-away and low-level awards. So, another long, time-consuming search was in order. It eventually unearthed Award Sites! Go for broke, apply for a few high-level ones, those with the most emphasis on contents, of course, and whose criteria do not specify that external links must open in a new window: rongorongo.org does not qualify. But why this strange rule? Just a little thought provided the answer: so that you can always get back to the page which sent you there; true: never trust the "Back" button. Ah! something learnt. Useful. Makes sense. Better stick with that in the future. So it was quite a surprise to find the Shadow Poetry Dragonfly Award in Anon's mailbox, almost by return mail, too. Not Gold, not Silver, not Bronze, just Merit, which made it all the more genuine-sounding, the only eye-candy at rongorongo.org being the Gallery of statues and sites, and even that was added as an afterthought, as a necessary evil in a bid to gain more visitors. The rest is forbiddingly bare and stark, and yes, it could do with a coat of paint and the odd flower or kazarimono. So, time to collect some awards, perhaps. There are some tangible benefits there:
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