- MY LIFE AND TIMES by Keith McCree -
From 'Upper Willamette Trails and Wildflowers' by Keith and Barbro McCree (HyperCard version)
These are images of cards from the first version of our guide (1990).
Our guide covered all 90 of the trails in the area near the headwaters of the Willamette River in the western Oregon Cascades, and 160 of the wildflowers that we found on them. We lived in the area from 1990 to 2007, and became very familiar with the trails and wildflowers in it.
We rated all 90 trails for wildflowers. Our ratings were not subjective, but were based on a count of wildflower species. Sixteen trails achieved our highest rating ('Wildflower Special'), with a score of more than 60 species out of a possible 160. We also gave our overall rating as a hiking trail, on a scale of * to *****
In addition to the ratings, each trail page included a map, a grade profile (a graph of elevation against distance along the trail), a list of other users who were officially allowed to use the trail, and a list of the wildflowers that could be found on it. Each wildflower page included a photograph of the plant in bloom, the botanical family, the color of the flower, the habitat in which the plant grew, when it bloomed, how common it was in this area (with a map), and a list of the trails on which it could be found. The names on the wildflower list for each trail were linked to the corresponding wildflower page, and the names on the trails list for each wildflower were linked to the corresponding trail page.
We included my collection of color slides of all the wildflowers, as well as about 80 of my slides of views from the trails, for a total of more than 300 color photographs.
The guide was fully interactive. It had thousands of 'hypertext links' like those that you are using to navigate this Web site. Instead of using a table of contents, you could just
For the original 1990 version for Macintosh, I used the hypertext language HyperCard, which was invented by Bill Atkinson and first published by Apple Computer in 1987. This version had multiple-choice sorting of both trail cards and wildflower cards. Trail cards could be sorted by any combination of grade, length, wildflower abundance and our overall rating. Wildflower cards could be sorted by botanical family, flower color, flowering season and habitat in which it could be found. You could use this feature to help you identify a wildflower. For example, you could sort the cards for plants with yellow flowers, blooming early in the season, and growing in dry, sunny places.
After the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, I developed a Web-browser version that was compatible with both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. It was essentially a huge Web site on a CD-ROM. This 1997 version used HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is less elegant than HyperCard but has some of the same hypertext features. It does not allow multiple-choice sorting of the data (see the next two chapters for sample pages from this version). Starting in 2001, I bundled a collection of about 400 digital photographs of trail scenes and wildflowers with this software (Chapter 28, Chapter 29).
The guide was unique in the way that it linked the wildflowers to the trails on which you could find them. It was designed to be read on a computer, not as a book. There must be hundreds of books on wildflowers, and many books on trails, but none that combine the two in this way. A book would have to contain thousands of pages to cover the information in our guide, and still would not be interactive.
