INTERVIEW with  the REBMASTER of  the SOUTHERN LEAGUE

George Paul Kalas, DixieNet Rebmaster and Southern League Internet Communications Director, Houston,  Texas, in the occupied Confederate States of America

How would you sum-up the content of your site?
DixieNet is a celebration of Southern culture in all its richness. We are very proud of our history, heritage and traditions and we hope it shows. The goal of DixieNet is to showcase our endangered Southern culture and to rally the Southern people and the world to the cause of our quest for social, cultural, economic and political independence.

What kind of people do you think visit it?
I receive a tremendous amount of email from our visitors so I have a pretty good idea of what our visitors are like. The majority, (probably over 90%) are Americans, Canadians and British. Well over half of our visitors are native Southerners or descendents of Southerners who are drawn to DixieNet because of its positive message of Southern cultural preservation. We've also had visitors from Norway, Sweden, France, Poland, Italy, Russia (Siberia), South Africa, the Carribean, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand.

Do you have any idea of the numbers of people visiting?
I placed a counter on DixieNet on March 22, 1996 and as of today, (December 10, 1996), DixieNet has recorded over 32,500 visitors. I estimate that DixieNet currently receives 45,000-50,000 visitors each year and growing.

What kind of feedback do you get from visitors?
About 95% is overwhelmingly positive, even from Yankees (Northerners), and visitors from other foreign nations. We do receive flamemail from time to time, but it comprises less than 1% of the total mail received. The remaining 4% are usually either non-committal, curious, skeptical or partially favourable to some of our goals and objectives. Overall we've been delighted with the response we've received from the online community.

What motivates you to put in the hard work necessary to maintain a site like yours?
The conviction that the South has the right to determine her own destiny and to exist as a free and independent confederacy of sovereign republics. My ancestors served in the Confederate Army and Navy and DixieNet is my way of keeping the faith with my forefathers.

Today, Dixie's unique heritage and culture are under unrelenting attack in this country by political agitators, cultural bigots, a liberal academia and an entertainment industry that perpetuates negative stereotypes of Southerners. This cultural war against my people has further inspired me to redouble my efforts for the cause of Southern independence. DixieNet is my way of refuting these people and of giving the silent majority of Southerners a voice in cyberspace that is denied us by other more mainstream media organs.

What have you learned from your experiences with this site?
First, I have learned that there exists an enourmous reservoir of good will towards the people of Dixie that is waiting to be tapped. One of the greatest pleasures of each day is to read the many kind letters of support that the Southern League receives from all over the world.

On the darker side, I've also discovered that those who hate the South carry with them a bigotry of almost pathological proportions. These anti-Southern bigots are people of a genocidal mindset whom you would have found manning the Nazi SS half a century ago. That's why I publish their letters on the website -- to show the world the kind of bigotry that goes unchallenged in America because the target is "politically incorrect".

What other sites do you find interesting and/or like?
That's a difficult question to answer. There are so very many truly great Internet sites out there and I fear that I may offend some truly hard working Southern webauthors if my list is incomplete. But if I had to name a few I'd have to say that my interest in Southern culture makes me an instant fan of almost any reputable web site that promotes the South.

Some of the better ones include The Confederate Network, CSANet, DixieCeltNet, Sons of Confederate Veterans, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Heritage Preservation Association; and many, many others that are listed on my Confederate Internet Sites page at http://www.dixienet.org/slhomepg/rebsites.html.

I also enjoy visiting other independence movements' sites around the world like the Lega Nord page, the Parti Quebecois page, the Nation of Hawaii site, etc. I probably spend about half my time visiting sites devoted to history, culture and government and the rest of the time I'm checking out webauthoring resource pages -- always looking for new ideas to improve DixieNet for our audience.

How do you see Web sites developing over the next five years?
Much depends upon bandwidth and how quickly it increases and whether it is able to keep up with the exponential growth of the Internet community. There is a tremendous desire on the part of most webauthors to enliven web sites with animation, sound, videos, VMRL, Java, Shockwave, ActiveX and many other advanced features -- but all of us are slaves to the reality that most of the net still surfs at 14.4bps and views your content on 14" monitors. Failure to keep page download times to a bearable minimum is death to a site and it is a constant struggle to keep bandwidth consumption low while still trying to enhance the user's experience with cool features.

Having said all of this, I think the bandwidth problems will be solved over the next five years because there is a huge pile of money to be made by those who lay those new, fast, net pipes that all of us are dying to surf on. I think that we will see an explosion of truly engaging and interactive sites. Sites that are solely composed of static pages will not die out, as is often predicted, so long as their content is compelling enough, but they will definitely not dominate the web as is presently the case. I also think we're going to see continued commercialisation of the web, and the appearance of more and more mega-sites that set standards that will be beyond the reach of the singleton webmaster to match. This is why successful sites will have to evolve beyond one-man shows and will need large staffs of creative and dedicated programmers, HTML coders and artists to keep up.

Do you have plans to develop your own site dramatically?
Yes. DixieNet went on-line in July of 1995, and quickly outpaced my ability to keep up with its expansion. In recent weeks I've begun recruiting other Southern League members to assist me with graphic design, HTML coding and processing the large number of emails we receive. This is a modest start.

Future plans for 1997 include a complete site redesign with newer graphics, forms, client-side image maps, online chat rooms, more photos of SL members and events -- and the addition of vast amounts of new content that currently fills a couple of file-drawers in my office.