• ProvenceBeyond (Beyond The French Riviera) is a completely private Web, and for the most-part unfunded.
• Beyond is not part of any government, group, organization, town or tourist office.
• Beyond is a one-person web.
The Birth of Beyond
Myself (Russ) and Jane were hiking the backcountry hills one day in the Spring of 1995 and ran across an interesting bush or flower we couldn't identify. After extensive home research we finally made our identification and I had the urge to share my discovery. Jane was deep into the workings of the Internet and suggested I make a little web to show a bit of the "real" countryside "beyond" the Cote d'Azur.
I hacked away at HTML coding (it was early days then), scanned a few photos, did some research through personal memories and books, and created a small web. Early content was added at my own whim, depending on what I was eager to share. As Beyond grew, there was constant reader feedback requesting more pages on nature or certain villages or areas.
Attempting to browse other webs I realized early-on that usability was as important as content: speed, easy navigation and understanding where you were at any time were key to enjoying the web browsing experience. The generous assistance of a graphics artist improved the "look" of Beyond, and a couple of years later another generous graphic artist helped us with a new image.
Beyond has been a very time-intense activity. This has been mainly a one-man effort, doing field research trips (great fun), reference research, photography, writing, HTML coding (we're still using BBEdit), page layout, itinerary creation and email. We're more or less settled into a routine now, adding content irregularly, trying to keep up with email, and making constant minor corrections and adjustments.
Here's Who
 OK, click on the wee photo for the gruesome results of father time on the father of Beyond - Russ Collins, by name. I began life in the northwest corner of the USA, and raised in and around Juanita Washington (not far from Kirkland and a bit farther from Seattle) a very long time ago. In those ancient, pre-computer days Kirkland had, I vaguely remember, a population of around 5000.
Later youth included a lot of thumb-based travel around the northwest and north central USA, and eventually US Navy sponsored travel across the Pacific. Our post-Pacific era was California based, as an electronic engineer and then a freelance technical writer in the Aerospace industry. Hit by the wanderlust again, I wandered across much of the rest of the United States as a freelance technical writer, with a few months on the side as a deckhand on sailing ships in the Bahamas.
From a Winter's job in Minnesota I accepted a six-month project in Holland ... and have been in Europe ever since. Working in Holland (and revelling in Amsterdam) for a few years, a year in England, and then to France. A few years in Paris, a tiny farm in a just-as-tiny hamlet in the Berry region of France, and then to the South of France.
I now live on the outskirts of Grasse, with easy access to the back country villages and mountains, but observe the world mainly, it seems, from behind our trusty Macintosh computer screen.
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