A FIELD GUIDE TO
88x31 BUTTONS
of the home pages of North America,
with notes on habitat, range and behavior

by Jonathan Haley

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

When I was a kid my grandfather used to take me birding. He'd drive us out to the Merced National Wildlife Refuge on winter mornings when the fog was still down on the fields, and we'd sit in the truck with a thermos and wait for the sandhill cranes to start talking. He had a Peterson guide to Western birds with his checkmarks in it going back to 1961, and he taught me the way the book teaches you: don't try to see the whole bird. Look for the field marks, the two or three things that tell this one apart from everything else. The black-and-white wings and the yellow bill. The orange on the wing that flashes when it flies.

I'm 19 now and a freshman at a community college here in the Central Valley, and I spend more time looking at home pages than at birds, which Grandpa says is a crime. But the habit stuck. About a year ago I noticed that the little 88 by 31 buttons at the bottom of everybody's home page come in species. There are a handful of common ones you see everywhere, they each have their field marks, they each nest in a certain part of the page, and some of them have habits. So I wrote the guide the way the bird books do it, one plate per species.

From August 22 to September 21 I kept a notebook next to the computer and logged every button I saw on every page I visited. That's my life list, at the bottom.

A note on the cardinal at the top: it's from the GeoCities.us clip art, and it's the closest I've ever come to one. Cardinals don't live out here. Grandpa has seen them in Ohio. I'm still waiting.

PARTS OF A BUTTON

Every species in this guide is exactly 88 dots wide and 31 tall. That's the standard size, the way a robin is a robin's size. Field marks to look for: the body color, the upper line and lower line of lettering (most species carry two), the edge (a light rim on the top and left with a dark one on the bottom and right means a beveled button), and whether it moves. Watch a button for five seconds before you identify it. Some species change plumage while you look.

All eight common species below come from the GeoCities.us clip art library, which is why they're so common: anybody can take one.

PLATE 1
GEOCITIES.US HOMESTEADER
Bouton homesteaderi

Adult, at rest

The house sparrow of home pages. You stop seeing it after a while, which is a shame, because it's a good-looking button.

PLATE 2
WEBRING MEMBER
Annulus mutabilis

Adult, in display

Identify by color alone at your peril. A red one and a blue one are the same bird a second apart.

PLATE 3
MADE WITH NOTEPAD
Scriptor notepadensis

Adult

PLATE 4
HTML 3.2 HAND CODED
Codex manualis

Adult

PLATE 5
BEST VIEWED AT 800X600
Spectator octingentorum

Adult

PLATE 6
56K MODEM FRIENDLY
Modulator patiens

Adult

PLATE 7
Y2K COMPLIANT
Millennium timidus

Adult, blinking

Under the rules of Tim Lomeli's Button Wall (see below), which turn away anything that flashes between two colors faster than about once a second, this species would not be admitted.

PLATE 8
I ♥ MIDI / TURN IT UP!
Clamor midicus

Adult, calling

THE TRADING SPECIES

Everything above is a common species, the same button on thousands of pages. But the most interesting buttons are the ones that exist only once: a site's own button, made by its owner, traded with other sites so each can put the other's on its page. Every one of those is its own species with a range of one site, and there are hundreds. No guide could cover them. The best place to observe them in the wild is a link exchange.

The one I go back to is Tim Lomeli's The Button Wall, a link exchange with a dozen partners' buttons set in a grid. Tim has rules for getting on the Wall, and they're the best description of a healthy button I've read: exactly 88 by 31, not 88 by 33; under 6K; animation only if it's calm; and you have to be able to read the site's name without leaning in. He checks every button on the first Sunday of the month. Here are three of his partners, each linked to its own site. Every button belongs to the site it points to.

Giant Pumpkin Growing

Kevin's UFO Sighting Reports

Stardust

Giant Pumpkin Growing: an orange pumpkin on the left, GIANT PUMPKIN in green and GROWING in orange on white. Perfectly still. It was Tim's Webmaster's Pick for September, for a daily growth log, a man chasing 500 pounds, and a weigh-off coming up in October.

Kevin's UFO Sighting Reports: a flying saucer over a green beam on a black starry sky, with the site's name in green and blue. Watch the saucer: its little lights change in three steps. Only a few dots move and the rest of the button holds still, which is what Tim means by calm, and it's on the Wall, so he agrees.

Stardust: pink script on deep purple with little white stars that twinkle in four steps. Another calm one.

The Wall itself has no button at the moment. Tim says his old one was 14K and flashed red and yellow, which broke his own rules, so he took it down. I respect that.

BUTTON ETIQUETTE

Save it to your own space. When you put up somebody's button, save the picture and upload it with the rest of your files. Don't point your page at their copy. It uses up their space and their bandwidth, and the day they rename it, your page gets a broken picture where their button was.

Always WIDTH=88 HEIGHT=31. Put the size in the tag, every time, so the browser can save room for the button before it arrives and your page doesn't jump around while it loads. And give it ALT text so people with pictures turned off know whose button it is. For a traded button that's a link, it looks like this:

<a href="/Orchard/Patch/5525/"><img
 src="pumpkin.gif" width="88"
 height="31" border="0"
 alt="Giant Pumpkin Growing"></a>

Don't let them flock. One page I logged this month had forty-three buttons at the bottom, eleven of them animated, in no order at all. It looked like a power line full of starlings, and I couldn't find the e-mail link. Three or four at the bottom of a page is plenty. If you trade a lot of buttons, give them a links page of their own, set in a grid the way Tim does, and say a word about each one.

MY LIFE LIST

August 22 to September 21, 1999. 412 home pages visited, every button on every page counted once.

Of the 412 pages, 261 had at least one button and 151 had none at all. The most on one page was the flock of forty-three. The rarest thing I saw all month was a button for a site that had closed, still sitting on somebody's page and pointing at nothing, like a nest box nobody's used in years. I see one of those almost every week now.

Grandpa looked over the list and asked how many I'd seen of each kind of bird this month. I didn't have an answer. We're going out to the refuge in November when the cranes come back, and I'm leaving the notebook at home.