Open Directory Project
Editor of the Portrait Painters Category
From 1997 through 2003, I reviewed hundreds of Arts Web sites for directories in AOL, Google, etc. as editor of the Portrait Painters category in the Open Directory Project, “the world’s largest human-compiled directory of the Web.”
Free to submit to and free to use, “the Open Directory was the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. ... The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web’s largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.”
In 1999, I had just started portrait painting as well as Web site design; and I was submitting my portrait painting Web site to various directories online. When I discovered that like many other categories, the Portrait Painters category of the ODP did not have an editor, I volunteered and was accepted. At first, there were less than 100 sites listed, with many submissions waiting to be reviewed; by the time I finished, in 2005, I had reviewed and listed hundreds of sites. I enjoyed viewing the great and great variety of portrait painting as well as Web site design, and I made many new friends worldwide along the way.
Below are links to copies of the ODP listings that I archived when I left: Please feel free to click on any of the links below, to bring up a Web page that looks much like it did in 2005 (However, if you click on any of the links in those pages, you will be taken to the pages as they look today). I am especially proud of how I was able to capture not only the technical aspects of the artists’ Web sites but also something of their style in the necessarily brief descriptions that I wrote.
Index Page to Portrait Painters Category (Note at the bottom my credit as Category Editor, which was unlisted on alphabetical pages)
Alphabetical Listings of Portrait Painters (Note that I relayed to higher editors in the ODP the fears of several artists that they would “get lost” in such subcategories; however, it was decided that the total list had grown, under my editorship, so long that it was necessary to divide it)
All Rights Reserved. Legal Notices.
