| ![]() About This SiteWhat you see today represents the second iteration and fourth home of this website. It was first located at ais.net in May of 1995 before moving to wwa.com that August and settling in June of 1996 at wcat.com. Portions of HTML in use there as late as September 2004 were unchanged from the first uploaded file. This new design is based on Intranet work done for WREX-TV and its parent, Qunicy Newspapers, Inc. from 2001 to 2003. It was a basic framework that allowed each subsidiary to create its own homepage for employees to quickly access local resources. Database driven and written entirely in Perl, each location could generate sites with unique logos, fonts, and color schemes -- and it could be set up with no knowledge of HTML. Simple and low-bandwidth, it was tailored for minimal WAN bandwidth and cross-platform compatibility at all screen resolutions used at the time. Centrally administrated, sites could be added and removed by corporate MIS as necessary. It included database "hooks" and control information to work with a suite of server-based tools to internally collect, manage, and publish data. The system was designed with the goal of integrating a newly-acquired property with the same news and master control software into the reporting structure in less than five minutes with only the knowledge of two IP addresses on the new LAN.
The site's highway motif is based on an unused theme and layout developed for the 1994 Marengo Community High School Yearbook, concept sketches of which date back to October 1992. The designs were inspired by Tom Cochrane's hit song "Life is a Highway" taken in context of major highway reconstruction in the town of Marengo, Illinois at that time. The signs used here adopt the style currently used by the Iowa Department of Transportation which feature cutout route markers with black borders on state and federal shields. Highway IA-286, incidentally, was decommissioned by the Iowa DOT on July 1, 2003. It ran from Glidden to Lanesboro. ![]() |
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