Jon's Homeschool Resources

Read Me

Please, read this page before you ask for personal advice, send me a link, link to one of my pages, or copy any of my text or markup.

Ask	top
Ask me for advice

People often ask me for homeschooling advice, and I do my best to answer quickly and on their terms. However, I do not have any substantial amounts of unpublished information. If I don't have any information on laws or support groups in your area in my list of lists, then your best bet will usually be to post a message to the home-ed mailing list or to the home-school news groups.

Please note that we are unschoolers here, and use no curriculum. In addition, I have a 'hands off' policy with regard to vendors, so I can avoid requests for free publicity and/or reviews. I can not and will not recommend any curricula, accredited distance learning, or online lessons - I urge you to take all these questions to the home-ed mailing list.

Send	top
Send me a link

I appreciate every link I receive via email, and they constitute a sizable minority of the material here. Unfortunately, I spend much too much time online, and so tend to put some submissions in an 'in basket' that I then attack when I have the time.

• Home schooler's personal home pages and links to other homeschool homepages generally get linked in as soon as I receive them, assuming that a quick check shows that they are indeed homeschoolers' pages.
• Lists of support groups in a particular area and/or a particular state's homeschooling laws often get filed for later processing, but get priority when I do have time to attack the backlog.
• Pointers to homeschooling products vendors' pages used to get such a low priority that at one point I had a nine months backlog in my Vendors folder. I finally decided to let market forces take care of this problem: I'm no longer providing free vendor links. If you'd like to have a link to your product on my page, please see the Vendors section for more information.
• Unfortunately, pointers to neat pages that kids will like generally get filed and forgotten. I just don't have the time to do a lot of Web crawling, and pointers to pages that are fun and educational - but not explicitly home school related - are definitely lacking around here. I'd like to do something about this someday, but fortunately there already are plenty of good kid's pages on the Web.

Link	top
Link to my pages

Please, go ahead and link to my resource page. Don't feel that you have to ask permission! I would, however, like to ask that you only link to the main resource page, http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs, and not to any of the subpages or named anchors. This leaves me the freedom to move and/or rename files and anchors.

If you still want to link to specific points in my pages, I suggest that you do something like

I mention this because some search engines - especially the ones that seek out pages automatically, instead of relying on submissions - show the temporary, accidental addresses, because that's how they ran into my pages. In turn, I've seen a few pages with links to these scruz.net addresses, instead of to the midnightbeach.com addresses. When I changed ISP's, these links all became invalid, while links to the midnightbeach.com addresses were still perfectly fine.

That's why I ask that you use midnightbeach.com in all your links. It's not a matter of vanity, that I think midnightbeach.com looks "cooler" than scruz.net/~jds or whatever - it's a matter of durability. Links to accidental addresses might break at any time; links to midnightbeach.com addresses should be good forever.

Icons for your links

I have a vaguely plausible homeschool icon at the top and bottom of every page. If you'd like to stick this icon beside your link to my site, there are three sizes to choose from: big-hs-icon.gif, the large picture that was at the top of the main page back in the mid '90's; small-icon.gif, the picture at the top of every page; and tiny-icon.gif, the little picture that's besides the 'go home' link ("Part of Jon's Homeschool Resource Page") at the bottom of subsidiary pages. While I've used 'Ms Clayfoot' for some years now, and she's probably an inseparable part of my 'brand', she is just some Corel3 clipart which I've never been totally thrilled with - she may be replaced at any time. I'd suggest that you not copy any of the icons to your system but instead use HTML like this sample

tiny 23 x 55 big 76 x 191 small 45 x 96

Copy	top
Copying my text or markup

Frankly, I can't see any point to doing this. What good's another homeschool page that just repeats what's already available somewhere else? To me, it makes much more sense to just link to my pages (after reading the caveats above) and concentrate your efforts on finding material I don't already have. Complementary pages are good for everyone; competing pages are just a silly waste of bandwidth.

Otoh, no matter what I say, some of you will still go ahead and copy my material. If you do so, be sure to give me credit. Plagiarism is illegal and immoral - while I won't sue you if you remove all the personal data from the <address> section at the bottom of each of my pages, I won't be particularly pleased, either.

Part of Jon's Homeschool Resources. Copyright © 1995..2002 Jon Shemitz <jon@midnightbeach.com> August 27, 1995..October 9, 2002