Starting Out

In the early days of the internet - a period I shall affectionately refer to as 'the mid-to-late 90s' - web pages, and good web pages in particular, were few and far between. Web design as a profession hadn't really developed, and most pages were written in plain HTML. Mine was no different.

Back then I had what I believe was a relatively popular web page on Geocities. The homepage displayed a cheerful pastel tiled rainbow background with a few supporting images and links. I had a page dedicated to Jess Harnell and Rob Paulsen, the voices of Wakko and Yakko from "Animaniacs," my favorite cartoon show. Another page was my "Rants" section, a kind of bloggy type page where I would occasionally write articles about things that irritated me.

My site's claim to fame, however, was the Ultimate Cartoon List, on which I endeavored to include the title of every cartoon ever made. The list was alphabetical with anchor links leading to each letter at the top of the page. I got quite a few emails from people who said it helped them figure out if such-and-such was a real cartoon, and so much support from people submitting additional shows for the list that I hadn't thought of. It was a great time on the web for me, and thanks to this experience, I realize that creating and maintaining a website was something I truly enjoyed.

As a 7th grader in middle school I feverishly wrote down my lengthy URL (which, thanks to Geocities naming conventions, probably included at least ten forward slashes and 23 numbers) on strips of paper and handed them out to everyone in school, including teachers. I was really quite good at marketing myself back then, in retrospect.

But it was a small internet back then. Nowadays I'd be lucky if someone even found my little site, and being emailed by an admirer would be as likely as being struck by lightning. But it's that memory that makes me want to try this web thing again. I already know HTML pretty well thanks to that experience in middle school (which continued into early high school). So now I'm learning CSS, JavaScript and Flash. I want to make fun and pretty web pages again, by today's updated standards.

So on with my Journey Into The Web!