The History of The Kaweah River Page

It been 10 years now since the Kaweah River Page went online so I thought it was about time to write a brief history of the page.

  • 1995 It was eight years since I first boated the Kaweah River. I was working at Tektronix in the Printers Division and we had the internet at our company for the past couple years. We used SGI Unix computers and we had Mosaic, the earliest of web browsers. I had only heard of the World Wide Web a couple of years before this. I had a friend, Ward Cunningham, from my earlier days at Tektronix who ran a web server on dialup. Ward was an early pioneer in the days of the internet. His rare two character domain name ,c2, was acquired in the earliest days of the internet. I asked Ward if wrote a web page about the Kaweah River if I could post in on his c2.com server. He said sure and he gave me a directory, /kaweah/ on the c2 server. I wrote the first edition of the page in Vi on Unix by looking at page source of other web pages and copying the syntax. The html was simple and the page remains largely unchanged in it's structure although a lot of content has been added. KISS (keep it simple stupid) has been the driving force since day one. I don't think any links have ever changed. Once a page is published, it stays there. Early images were created by scanning photos and postprocessing the images in XV, a Unix graphics program by John Bradley, that I became very partial to.

  • 1996 An early html editor, Gnnpress, came along running on Unix. Some of the editing of the page was now done in Gnnpress, but I soon switched back to Vi because I liked the total manual control of the formatting. Content was gradually added to the page. The editing of the page was still done at work and ftp uploaded to Ward's server at c2. There was no real time updating of the page from Kaweah River area. The boating season updates had to wait until I returned to Oregon. There were no digital cameras so 35mm prints were scanned and postprocessed in XV before posting to the web page.

  • 1997 The Jan 2, 1997 flood rearranged the river and the Descriptions by Section were updated to reflect the changes to the river. Photos of the major rapids were updated. A Flood of Jan 1997 web page with pictures was added. Sometime around this time c2.com got ISDN that sped up service over it's original dedicated dialup connection.

  • 1998 This was a big water El Nino year and peak flows were over 5000cfs. We spent 2 weeks running the river, mostly the North Fork. The river was so high the only sane place was on the North Fork and we ran it 10 days in a row until the second week of July! When we did get on the main stem it was from Dinely down only as it was really big on the Gateway section. My Buddy Steve Lyford came down with me for that trip and the "Vacation 98" photos were put on the c2 server. Those photos are scanned from prints and processed in XV and were posted with some delay on the web page. The weekly runoff forecasts from DWR were added to the page. The page is now edited on a Windows PC and manually edited in Notepad.

  • 1999 Content on The Kaweah River Page continued to be updated and added.

  • 2000 The Picture of the Day was born. By now I had a digital Camera, a Canon D-450 Zoom 1.3 megapixle camera that I still use today. I was on the Kaweah for a three month stay and had brought my NT4 computer to California. I was out on the river taking pictures every day and picked one photo each day to reduce to 600x800 pixles, add a caption and post it to the c2 server as Picture of the Day. A webpage was made from a selection each days photos and uploaded each night to my ISP account web page at Teleport. My Teleport webspace was limited to 5MB so only the last couple days of photos were available at any one time. The Kaweah River Page was updated nightly with new news. HTML editing of the web page is still manual text editing but now done with a freeware program, Araneae, a simple editor that provides syntax highlighting to aid in formatting.

  • 2001 The Kaweah Cam was born. I was down on the Kaweah for several weeks in the spring of 2001 and I installed the Kaweah Can on my Mom's property near Cateye. I had my NT4 PC there with a WinTV Video Capture Card. The camera operated for those few short weeks with the image uploaded every hour by dialup to c2. By now I was updating the web page daily with new news during the boating season. c2.com gets DSL service so the web page loads faster.

  • 2002 I get DSL service to my house in Oregon in the fall of 2000. I immediately installed a web server and posted an early web page for the many pictures I have taken over the last 2 years. Eventually all the pictures I have ever taken on the river have been posted to the Kaweah River Pictures Page served from my Oregon web server. Redirection links to my home server are auto updated on the Kaweah River Page if my home IP address ever changes. The Kaweah River Pictures Page became quite popular with rafting guests of Kaweah Whitewater Adventures as they rummage the page for the photos of their rafting trip. The flow graph on the main web page is changed to display the 4 day flow graph from dreamflows.com .

  • 2003 The Kaweah Cam commenced continuous operation on Jan 1st. uploading the hourly photo of the river. The digital rivergauge was completed and installed on the Kaweah River. It operated posting hourly water level and water temperature data to the Kaweah River Pictures Page until a nearby lightning strike blew up the computer interface. The river gauge was taken offline after the strike until lightning protection can be added. In July of 2003 the hourly air temperature reporting was commenced.

  • 2004 The kaweahriver.org domain name that I had registered 3 years earlier was finally routed to The Kaweah River Page at it's c2.com/kaweah location. The Kaweah River Page retains it's original location at http://c2.com/kaweah/ . The Kaweah River Page reaches 50,000 hits.

  • 2005 The Kaweah River Page, now in it's 10th year on the web, achieves Number One in the search results in a Google search for kaweah This is without ever having registered the page with any search engines. The Kaweah Cam is switched to update at 15 minute intervals during a Jan 9th flood watch event helping Tulare County officials and The National Weather Service keep an eye on the rising river.

    The Kaweah River Page, http://c2.com/kaweah/ Copyright © 1996,1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005 by Bill Pooley. All rights reserved. The Kaweah River Page is a non profit web site.
    This page is http://c2.com/kaweah/history.html

    Page Created 02.06.05 Last modified: 02.06.05