Before we launched obliquity.com, we had both created large sets of personal web pages covering subjects as diverse as cats, astronomy, genealogy and changes to US immigration law.
Judging by the access statistics, many of these pages became very popular with web-surfers around the globe. We had visitors from most of the countries of the world.
The original sets of web pages were hosted on computers at the places where we worked and studied, but subsequent events, particularly the decision by the British government to close the Royal Greenwich Observatory, made us realise the importance of providing a permanent home for our web work.
That is why we registered our own domain, obliquity.com, and created the corresponding web site, www.obliquity.com.
Following intense interest in the double Blue Moon of January and March 1999, the popularity of obliquity.com rose quickly. We now get an average of 3200 distinct page hits per day, or over a million per year.
This is a frames-free zone. There are no imagemaps. There are no images that you are forced to load in order to make sense of the page. This site is best viewed with any browser!
The entire web site has been created using Obliquity's Seven Rules of Good Web Site Design.
No, the hardest question was what to call the domain!
We drew up a list of possible names, drawing on our interests and a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. However, the Internet is getting to be a crowded place these days, and we found that many of the candidates on our list had already been taken by other people and companies.
In the end, we found one that we both liked. It's short, it's unusual, it's memorable, it's astronomical ... and nobody else had claimed it!
If you would like to know what the word obliquity actually means, we have written a short explanation. It tells you about our logo too.
Copyright 1995-2007 by David Harper and Lynne Marie Stockman