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Minors
in Cyberspace
as published in Minor Monthly
by
Richard Hobbis
Late
in 1994, I became an internet junkie. I had been playing and
working with computers for over ten years by then so the internet
was a breath of fresh air into an admittedly 'nerdy' career.
There is just so much to see on the internet that I found that
I could spend all night just 'surfing', going from place to
place, topic to topic at just the click of a mouse button. I
can see why some marriages have failed because of the net, it
is an addiction and I was hooked.At the end of every month my
Internet Service Provider (ISP) would tell me just how bad my
addiction had become. I was spending, on average, over 100 hours
online every month. Just as well local calls in New Zealand
are free, otherwise it could have become a very expensive habit!
That
was five years ago and not much has changed since. Well, not
with the addiction anyway. Back then if you were to enter the
words "Morris Minor" into one of the internet search engines
you would have been presented with maybe a dozen pages on the
World Wide Web that referred to our favourite little car. And
most of those would have been references to probably the first
ever Morris Minor website, 'Deb's
UK Morris Minor Homepage'. As well as a few photos and some
information on her own car, Deb's page had a guestbook which
was in effect a list of all the people that had seen the site
and wanted to leave a comment. There were names from all over
the world; UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, South
Africa to name a few.
For
some strange reason, I found Deb's page a bit of a relief. Up
until that time I had figured that Morris Minors were such unassuming
and simple little cars that only grandmothers, poor students
and myself drove them. I used to be a poor student and drove
my Minor to school from the day I got my licence at the age
of 16. For some reason I never quite managed to save up enough
money for an Escort or a Cortina so the Minor followed me into
my working years. To find out that 'normal' people all around
the world drove Minors out of choice was like being forgiven
for my sins.
Today
the situation on the internet is very different. A typical search
engine such as AltaVista will return thousands of 'hits' including
everything from booksellers and parts suppliers to Minor Monthly's
own website and personal homepages. At last it looks like it's
cool to have your own Morris Minor webpage. A few pics of your
pride and joy, a guestbook, and some links to other Minor websites
seems to be the order of the day. And
who am I to ignore public opinion?
My
own Minor webpage first saw the light of the web back in 1995,
but I wanted it to be more than a static 'here's me, and here's
my car' page. It started out as a picture gallery of modified
Minors in New Zealand, using the title 'Modified Minors Down
Under' - a kind of 'here's lots of other people's cars' page.
I had such a large collection of photos of modified Minors that
I knew I could keep it going for quite a while, and anyway,
someone else would do standard Minors. After a year or so no
one else had done a site for standard Minors, so I revamped
mine to become 'Minor Mania!',
a site that provides pictures, technical specifications, modifying
and restoration tips and contact information for clubs and specialists.
Of
course, there are other websites devoted to the Morris Minor.
Most sites tend to be personal pages where the proud owner of
a Minor displays photos and specifications of their pride and
joy to the world. A good example of this is 'Ursula
- A Modernised Morris Minor'. The owner obviously loves
her car and wants the world to know it! Another good page is
'Morris
Minor and more' which follows the restoration of the author's
van as well as providing other interesting information and links.
The Morris Minor Owners
Club has one of the best Minor sites on the net today. It
is packed with club news, information and articles from the
club magazine, technical tips, events and more. You can even
join the club online. Morris Minor specialists have created
websites to help advertise their services to a wider audience.
The internet is perfectly suited to companies who can provide
'mail-order' type services. Well known companies in the UK such
as the Morris Minor
Centre (Birmingham), Morris
Minor Centre (Bath), and CS
Autoclassics all have their own websites.
Minor
Monthly has also had it's own website for some time. It
started soon after the first issue and was updated every month
with feature articles and pictures from each issue. Publishing
pressures caused a halt to site updates for a while but now
it's back online (along with Poundbury Publishing's other magazines
such as 'Dorset' and 'Point to Point'). With a new look and
a new commitment to remaining up to date Minor Monthly online
should prove to be very popular. There are dozens of other websites
devoted to the Minor and new ones appear all the time; and sometimes
they disappear.
And
therein lies a warning to those wanting to make their own webpage.
Do it by all means, the more the merrier, but remember that
a good website with great content can be a complete waste of
time if there is no room or time for improvement. In a way the
world wide web is like a huge collection of books, great reading,
but you are unlikely to read a particular book again. But what
if the author was constantly rewriting the book, just after
you had finished it? You'd have to read it again just to see
if the butler still did it. For instance, I probably spend about
5 hours a week working on new ideas for Minor Mania!. The long
standing 'Deb's UK Morris Minor Homepage' is still there but
it hasn't been updated for at least 3 years. Another old site
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