HN is made up of two people. Or so we'd have you believe. One is a father, one is his son. Chuck Hastings serves as the "copy-boy" of sorts, writing most of the text that you read on HN (not this, of course). Charles Hastings gets to do everything else; he gets the fun jobs such as coding HTML, creating nifty graphics and editing out his father's mistakes.

The prototype of HIGHLANDNET was created the spring break of 1996, and more heavily developed during the beginning of his summer vacation.

The HN pages are written with Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Notepad running on a Windows 3.11/DOS machine. None of those HTML-creating frontends do well enough to be used (PageMill, Frontpage, etc...). Adobe Photoshop handles all of the image editing very well. These pages look best with NN 2.0. Download it from the above link.

That's about it. Questions can be addressed to us.

Neat, huh?

HIGHLANDNET first came online in July 1996. We're a nonprofit organization (for now) aimed at spreading as much information about Scottish cultural, entertainment, and competitive news and events as possible.

Our initial focus is California events. We'll include information about all the Highland Games or festivals in the state in somewhat greater detail than you'll find most places. Eventually, we'll spread out to include data from the Western U.S. Who knows? With support from the public, we may be able to expand even more to show detailed information countrywide.

Our games pages include detailed info on Highland Dance, Piping, Drumming and Heavy Athletics competitions. For those who want to register on the spot, HIGHLANDNET provides a generic registration form you can print yourself. Names and addresses of event registrars are there too. And, if you need directions to the Games, no need for a map book. We'll also show hotel-motel-camping information when it's made available to us. And, if a Games event has its own web page, HIGHLANDNET will link to it for your convenience.

We're including a mailbag section. Here are your letters and comments, limited only by your imagination. Recipes, hints and tips, complaints, whatever: mail it in and we'll include it. And, we're going to try a browser photo album. If you have a favorite photo you'd like to share with everybody else, send it along and we'll run it.

Clan news, and news and information about Scottish clubs and organizations, have their own pages. If you want to join a dance association, or one of the many clubs, look here: we'll include an entry blank (if possible) or information on who to contact to request one.

There are pages for Commercial Advertising. If it's a part of Sottish heritage or tradition, we'll include it. Used kilts for sale, wanted to buy bagpipes, vendor lists: all are in our advertising section for your convenience.

Now: how do we pay for it?

Websites, postage, phone calls, photo scanning all cost money. Although HN is not trying to earn enough to buy out Bill Gates, we'd like to pay the bills (and perhaps upgrade the equipment) without putting ourselves into Chapter 11. So- we charge a small fee for some of the services we include in HIGHLANDNET's pages. (Really: the fees are so small they're more a sponsorship arrangement than anything.) For example, a commercial advertiser can appear on HN for $10 a month, $50 for 6 months, or $90 for a whole year, including one copy change every other month.