Then there's the name. Naming websites has always been difficult. My first site was "Castle on a Cloud", which was the title of a song from Les Miserables. The next was "The Girl in the Golden Bower", which was the title of the painting on a set of book plates Christine gave me in sixth grade. It's a beautiful painting of a girl sleeping on green leaves surrounded by all sorts of forest animals. The painting was from the cover of a picture book by the same title by Jane Yolen. The next website was "Daydream Believer", which was a song by the Monkees. Our first assignment in Art I was to make a collage that expressed our personalities. Mine had lots of trees and sunny windows and cats and things and in the center I pasted the words "Daydream Believer", which I had found in a magazine. The teacher loved it and I thought it would make a good title. But by the time that site was getting outdated I was tired of using other people's titles and found that I was boxing myself in by trying to fit a title on my site, which was essentially myself.

I had used a prism metaphor for years to explain my view on religion to people. The speech basically went that there is a beam of pure white light, but that humans are too small and flawed to see it. Therefore we put a prism in the light, breaking it into many colors, which we can see. The light represents God, the prism religion, and the colors the different creeds people believe in. None of the colors is the pure light, but each one is an aspect of the light. Thus, while all religions conflict on one issue or another, they are all partially right and partially wrong. A while ago it occurred to me that the same metaphor also applied to the website and me. I had been trying to find a title which would accurately represent me, yet would lend itself to a theme and be interesting visually as well as mentally. All the titles I had used represented some aspect of me, but none were wholly accurate. The prism of the internet was refracting me into different aspects and therefore misrepresenting me. So, why not just use "prisms" as the title? These pages are my thoughts, and I have tried to make them as complete and representative of myself as possible.

We cannot exist in a vacuum, or at least not on the web. Therefore you'll find lots of links scattered through the entries. I know this is regarded as a foolhardy thing to do in web design because it tends to lead people away from your own page, but I think the people who are interested in what I write will come back. And I think it helps to give you background on the things I refer to, so that if you don't know what nutella is you can follow the link, and not if you do know.

The "At the Moment" section was an idea borrowed from Heidi Hodge-McMurdo. Hers was the first online journal I ever enjoyed, and in many ways she is still my role model web-wise. In this section I can add all the little, less important things that I would forget otherwise. The weather, for example, isn't something I would normally include, but I think it influences my mood and the flavor of the whole day. Words and phrases are always popping into my head and often they reflect some of what I'm thinking, so there's also a word of the day. The highlight of my day is something I got from my father - often at dinner he used to say "Today I got to walk around Moorland Commons inspecting fences and the weather was really beautiful. That was the highlight of my day." This seems a good place to make myself think about the highlight of my day, and thinking about that is a nice way to end an entry, I think.

I was originally going to have each month be a diffent color of the rainbow, but when I got to May and was faced with the prospect of a whole month of orange I decided to only do the colors I liked. I will try to pick something that sort of represents the month, though -spring green for May, etc.