Llamapaedia was born something like this:
I spent my second summer in Vet School at Virginia Tech working for the Veterinary Medical Informatics Program and Dr. Jeff Wilcke. It was there in the Summer of 1996 that I learned HTML and general Web design principles. I found that writing for the web is much easier than most people realize. I spent most of my time in the Drug Information Lab working on the growing Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine Web Server. One day Greta came into the office and asked me how to find information about llamas on the internet. I showed her a few search engines and let her loose. After about an hour she still hadn't found what she was looking for. She sought information about the care and management of llamas. All she found were a few paragraphs here and there and listings of events; not the thorough information source she had hoped.
Greta asked me how easy it would be to start a web site on llamas. Since Virginia Tech gave students free web space, I didn't think it would be difficult at all. I was looking for an application for my new skills and she needed someone to do the computer stuff. We worked on a basic framework and layout and first published it as Llamapaedia on May 29, 1996. Greta dedicated herself to providing the information while I learned how to format graphics and pages for the Web.
Llamapaedia soon out grew the capacity of the free webspace at school, so we switched the site to Simplenet and aquired our domain name in October 1996. I have been quite pleased with Simplenet's service and plan to stay with them indefinitely.
I graduated from VMRCVM in May 1998. I am working with small animals at the Lake Forest Veterinary Hospital in Gaithersburg, Maryland with Mark Liberto, DVM.
Last updated on June 6, 1998
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