First, I would like to apologise for the state my home pages are in. It is a very old site, and there has been periods where I have been very active updating it and years where I havenīt touched it whatsoever, which makes the maintenance rather tedious.
The site was first created in the early 90s and was until 2001 situated under http://www.imf.au.dk/~lins. I created the pages as a way to learn HTML and one of the first pages I created which still exist, was Balders home page. I had always said that I did not want a home page since I did not feel I had anything to share that would interest people I did not know, furthermore I hated sites where people put pictures of their dogs etc. So naturally one of the first things I did was to create a homepage for my dog...
Since Klaus and I purchased a digital camera in 1999, it hasn't been a problem to fill the site. Since then the primary purpose of the site has been to show pictures to family and friends, since emailing pictures is inconvenient for the sender as well as the receiver, let alone that most people have a limit on the size of their mailbox and get pretty cross when you overflod it with your (more or less interesting) pictures.
In 1999 we went on a months skiing holiday in France, and we created a site which was kept continuously updated. It was such a huge success, that we did it again in 2000 when we traveled around Australia in an airplane. The appreciation was overwhelming: People liked to follow us while traveling, and afterwards the site has been used by many as valued travel information. We still get much response from the skiing site, the FlacrOz site, from Klaus' pioneering tandem site, and from our photo pages in general. Both of us have photography as a hobby, and we put pride in our pictures being artistically beautiful rather than just pictures of persons and places. In fact, our pictures have even been used commercially and 2 of them can now be found in a company brochure and on a cd cover, respectively!!!
Well, in time of writing, it is almost 4 years since we flew around Australia. Since then I must admit that the site has been left more or less to it's own devices. I made a design brush up when I purchased the domain stougaard.org and added my family's sites. It is about due time for a revision and major update. A lot of the old stuff should also be removed (specially since some is updated and some links are dead). I do not promise this to happen soon - it is much easier to apologise than to do the actual work ;-)
I have always kept the sites in plain HTML, because I started out web designing in a time and in an environment where the audience (mainly universities around the world) did not have access to frames, flash, etc. The first sites I constructed was for two research centres at the University and for a choir in which I sang.
Lately I have been looking into CSS (cascading style sheets) which is a design sheet that is loaded into a HTML page. The wonders of it is, that if CSS is not supported, the page can look alright anyway. Now the trick is finding a nice design and finding out what code is supported in the various browsers (Explorer, Opera, and Mozilla) - you don't believe how many bugs there are in the browsers, things that should work but for some reason doesn't. My first published contribution have been to brush up on the CSS for aragost.
Furthermore I have been making a lot of web applications (at work). If I get around to it, I will some day construct an application to simulate point processes (part of my university work) and publish it here for other scientist in this particular area to use.
Why did I choose the domain stougaard.org? Well, naturally because my name is Stougaard ('gaard' means farm in Danish and 'Stougaard' is the name of the farm from where I descend). The suffix was mainly because .dk was taken and .com was for sale by one of these companies buying domain names just for earning on the resale - I refuse to support that! Thus, the only available (that made sense) was .org. This is a bit unpractical because of the email address which people often type with the wrong suffix. But since I have come to terms with this: In order to get a unique name for a software library, the convention says to take your domain name in reverse order (thus mine would be org.stougaard.libraryname). If I ever should want to publish any software I have made privately, it would probably not be in a commercially context but rather as open source, and following the other great open source vendors out there, org.stougaard would be the better name for such a library :-)