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“It’s reducing Professor Bytwerk’s teaching effectiveness and lowering Jimmy’s grades. It has taken over their lives,” said CAS professor Quentin Schultze, tongue-in-cheek. Schultze was joking about an ongoing competition between CAS professor Randall Bytwerk and sophomore James Alblas. With some prompting from Schultze, who is Bytwerk’s colleague and Alblas’ advisor, the two began a friendly competition last fall to see whose website could attract the most visitors.

“We started keeping track [of site visits] and gloating, depending on who was ahead,” Bytwerk said.

“[But] it’s not like we total up at the end,” Alblas pointed out. “It’s just a daily thing.” Alblas said his site receives 300 to 400 hits daily, according to the Calvin server’s hits counter, and Bytwerk’s page usually gets from 350 to over 400.

Both websites are on the Calvin server but their subject matters are very different.

Bytwerk’s page is called the German Propaganda Archive. Its pages consist of German-to-English translations of propaganda documents from three eras: pre-Nazi Germany (before 1933), Nazi Germany (1933-1945) and post-World War II communist East Germany (1945-1989).

www.calvin.edu/~jalbla46

Alblas’ page is titled The Buffy Zone, and contains material pertaining to the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“It’s like an online magazine,” said Alblas. The site has interactive contests and several weekly columns about the show, including a section of electronically edited photographs of the show’s characters and Alblas’ predictions for upcoming episodes’ plot developments.

The competition began after Alblas took an interim class taught by Bytwerk and Schultze, called “Advanced Web Page Design,” in January 1998, where Bytwerk and Alblas met. Alblas’ site had been running since March 1997, originally from his hometown, and Bytwerk’s began in February 1998 as part of a Calvin project, “Alive.”

The “Alive” project, started in 1998, was an attempt to encourage faculty to use the Web. The project focused on Web use as both an educational tool and an opportunity to reach a wider audience than the Calvin community, explained Bytwerk.

“I’ve been interested in the area of propaganda since graduate school,” said Bytwerk, when asked the reason for his site’s topic. “Some of the courses I teach cover it.”

His students were the first to benefit from the German Propaganda Archive. “I put 10 or 12 items in translation -- my translation -- on the Web and told students they were there,” Bytwerk said. “After we’d been doing this for a month, suddenly I had a pretty good site.”

Bytwerk does his own translations from German to English and posts them to the Web, and his student assistants, Rob Veenstra last year and Julie Vugteveen this year, have scanned pictures for the pages.

Alblas’ site began for a much different reason than Bytwerk’s.

“When the show (‘Buffy’) first aired, that’s when I first got into the Web,” he said. “I heard about websites and I saw this show. It became my hobby. The shows kept coming and I kept updating [my site].”

Alblas learned how to upload a page to the Internet from his older brother, who had set up several webpages. Alblas transferred The Buffy Zone to Calvin’s server when he came here in the fall of 1997.

“People just come to the site because they’re interested in the show,” said Alblas. “It’s the longest-running Buffy site, besides the official site.”

Alblas is a group major – CAS, French and social work – and would like to use website creation as part of his future career.

About the continuing contest between Bytwerk and himself, Alblas said, “The good competition will go until the end of this year, then I’ll be off campus, so it’ll be harder to do daily updates.”

Bytwerk also said that the competition is not his primary motivation, although he does have fun with it.

“My main reason for checking [the Web hits counter] is not to find out if I’m beating Jimmy but to find out what people are interested in.”

Bytwerk’s site is located at <www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/> and Alblas’ site is at <www.calvin.edu/~jalbla46>.