August 2003 - KSN.org started out as a summer project for our family, a fun way to get our daughters involved in researching and documenting our nature-oriented activities. With that in mind, we tried to give the kids as much input as possible, and to make every item on the site very relevant to them.

The kids came up with the idea and the domain name (Kids Saving Nature.org), and they drew all the pictures. All the photographs are from family activities. The interviews are actual transcripts of our conversations, or the result of us leaving the girls written questions and making them figure out the answers.

We did decide to include "Parents' Notes" for the benefit of anyone who may want a little more information or who may want to try one of these activities.

We will add to the site as we go along. We already have pages planned for Finding Fossils, Collecting Jars (a great nature craft), Identifying Butterflies, and tons of other stuff.

Technical Notes - This project was also a tutorial for Dad. The pages were developed without an HTML editor, and are probably a shameful collection of bad techniques, but the exercise is serving as a fun foray into the world of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. If things don't look right on your browser...oh well. I tested it on recent versions of IE and Netscape, but this site won't degrade nicely, as they say. As I learn more, the whole thing will be more robust, but our primary audience at this point is our family.