Jerry Oltion’s homepage is what happens when a science-fiction writer and an amateur astronomer refuses to choose which half of his life deserves the domain.
Oltion describes himself as a science and science-fiction writer and amateur astronomer. His homepage says he has published 15 novels and more than 150 stories, and that his fiction appearances in Analog eventually passed one hundred. From 2016 through 2025, he also wrote the magazine’s “Astronomer’s Workbench” column for Sky & Telescope, focusing on homemade astronomy equipment.
That would already be enough material for a normal author site.
Instead, the homepage keeps going.
There are pages about sundials, astronomy on a budget, telescope accessories, observing chairs, pitch-hardness testing, homemade finders, equatorial platforms, binocular telescopes, giant scaled-up Astroscans, astrophotography, cataracts and observing, and other projects that grew out of actually using and building equipment.
One of the site’s centerpieces is Oltion’s trackball telescope, which he says he spent much of 2005 designing and building. Sky & Telescope featured the concept in its August 2006 issue. Later telescope projects repeatedly build on the same willingness to solve a practical problem in the workshop and then document the result online.
This is what personal publishing is good at
The charm is the lack of separation between professional and personal subjects.
The bibliography sits near pages about a 1969 Volkswagen Beetle that was wrecked and rebuilt. Telescope design sits next to cat photographs. A science-fiction author can explain a split-pupil finder, then point toward a novel, then wander back into astronomy.
A commercial content strategy would probably divide all of that into separate brands.
The personal Web lets it remain one person’s archive.
That makes the site useful to several audiences at once. Science-fiction readers can trace Oltion’s writing. Amateur astronomers can find practical construction notes. Telescope builders can see designs that were later featured in specialist magazines. Internet historians can see what happens when a personal site accumulates decades of actual activity instead of being periodically replaced with a cleaner five-page portfolio.
The site is also unusually good at connecting print and Web publishing. Magazine articles point readers toward expanded online material; project pages preserve additional photographs, dimensions, and explanations that would be awkward to fit into print.
For modern webmasters, that is still a powerful model: use the website for the depth the printed or platform-bound version cannot hold.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many personal sites where the real value comes from accumulated side projects. Jerry Oltion’s is one of the better examples because the side projects are often as interesting as the career they sit beside.