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I started thinking about creating my own web page after I saw what my friends could do. After some encouragement (in the form of, "Dave, get your own damn web page! Just use Geocities."), I established my own site. The web fascinated me since I first hopped on it in late 1995, so I bounced around and tried to find as many images as I could that I could put on this site.
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/8539 I could start building my web page. I created my first page in Netscape Navigator Gold (back when Netscape
was _the_ best and most stable browser). Netscape Navigator Gold contained a page designer segment, and it
worked decently for what I needed.
Despite my desire to make it heavily "Young Ones"-themed, I think that's all I had on there from that
show. I did have a link to a Young Ones page that used an image of the group on University Challenge (an
imaginary show on the TV show). I did, however, have a music review page, where I reviewed CDs I bought.
Black background. Red text. Demons and not-so-vaguely satanic imagery. Blood drops used as
bullet points. That persisted through a couple of versions. One of the next versions had frames. I
rather liked frames, since it seemed to load less with each changed page. Some browsers didn't support it,
and it gradually fell out of favor. The fourth incarnation brought a few minor changes. Around this time, Yahoo had acquired Geocities and changed the directories to the person's username. Since I really wasn't fond of: http://www.geocities.com/completbastard/ I moved my site to its current location. I added a page for the local metal band Girth, but I never really
got off the ground with that. More imagery From this to my fifth incarnation, I decided I had enough with the red-on-black color theme and the borrowed
images. I wanted something more cheerful than the doom and gloom from before. Something a little more
colorful and more reflective of my nature would help. What I came up with certainly didn't exhibit the red-and-black
of the past, but it didn't express much either. The light cream background with dark sea green text and ornaments
stepped in the right direction, though. I think my favorite parts were the European-nation-sticker-ish title
images and my bullets. The bullets were my first shot at doing images pixel-by-pixel. I like the direction
I took with this site, but I changed the color scheme and nothing else. The table arrangement created spacing
problems and ended up having a couple of spots where sections would be larger than others. Frankly, I knew
I could figure out something better than this. But, one step at a time will eventually get me to where I
want to go. My web site stayed in the same arrangement for many years with one real color scheme change in that span. As with anything where my imagination runs out, I let it sit as-is. I liked this color scheme for being drastically different from what I had before. It had some color and some original design features that certainly added more character. When I revisited the design back in late 2002, I thought it looked ... boring. Bland. Lacking in character. The site looked better, but it didn't have much to do with me. A web site is generally a reflection of the person or entity who created it, and its design usually says something about that entity. In the evolution of my site, I see this phase as experimental. I tried a few elements that I liked (round bullet points, green text, cream background), but those elements really didn't look all that great together. Around this same time, I had to create a web site while in the teacher credential program. I knew I would have an easy time creating one, but I needed to think about how I wanted it. In some way, I wanted it to say something about myself without actually writing it out. My Scottish pride started around this time, so I thought I'd look for a good tartan. I ended up with the Clan Scott dress tartan, which is one I rather like and like a bit better than many others. Also, I had a German friend who e-mailed me a bunch of pictures from her trip to Scotland. She had a rather nice image of Scone Palace, so I received approval to use it on my site. I created a simple index page with the tartan as the background and a table in the middle. The table had my name on the top, Scone Castle in the middle in a green background, and three links on the bottom with each link in its own column in the row. Each link went to a plain cream page that housed whatever my class required for the site. Once I left the credential program, I realized that this credential site would eventually disappear once my account expired. I liked it so much, I thought, "why don't I use it for my personal site?" So, I did. It took some tweaking to get all my links on the index page (since I had many more pages on my personal site) and redid the linked-page design. So now, three or four years later, I tightened it up a bit and changed a few of the graphics. Sometimes less is more. Since I really have had less going on with my site, it made less sense to have as many pages to my site as I did. The days of having a separate index page have left us ... oh ... many years ago (if it was ever all that cool to begin with). Combine many pages together, remove pages that serve no purpose (e.g. the old "Links" page, which has been condensed to four links on my index page), and cut down on the number of images involved. Do all of that, and you get Neurotic V7.0, the Tenth Anniversary edition of this site. With information more condensed and easier to find and more room above-the-fold, my site should be a better visiting experience. Now that ten years have passed, I wonder what the next ten will bring. Will I continue to blog through those ten years? Or, will there be a simpler, "cooler" mode that all people will use? Maybe my site will undergo a huge transformation into a hub for whatever I get into. Maybe it'll stagnate and not change much again, eventually to disappear and be a fleeting memory of my fellow, loyal readers. But, as long as I have the time and desire to contribute something to the online world, I'll continue writing. To another ten years! |
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So, various images like the "Mac Free" image made it onto my site. I went
along with the Geocities ad and picked a button they had available. This one wasn't one of the common ones,
and I rather liked it. If I recall correctly, Geocities (when it was an independent entity) would potentially
kick you off their server if you didn't credit them for their web space in this way. I know I received at
least one e-mail from them concerning it. Before Yahoo, Geocities had virtual neighborhoods established.
In theory, each neighborhood would house the same type of web pages. I think I best associated with
the music neighborhoods, so I picked an address on Sunset Strip's Alley. Once I had my web address established:
I had to have at least an index.html page, so I created a page for that.
I needed to create semi-original images, so I created things like the "Enter if you Dare" image.
Sadly, the "Enter if you dare" text is the only original thing on that image at right. Black
background. Red text. Borrowed images spliced together into original formations. That's about
all my page had. I tried to make it relatively tied to the Young Ones, one of my favorite TV shows at the
time. I found a MIDI of Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday", which is a song featured in "The
Young Ones" and is the title of the final episode. I think I might have had a short introduction using
a quote from Jertsey Balowski this early on as well. That introduction went something like this:
I
had the beginning of my quotes page and a page detailing the events of the Warhammer campaign. I also had
something I called the "Gripe Vine." Basically, I wrote about whatever issues I had some sort of
opinion about. Frankly, it looks a heck of a lot like a very old blog. One of them was about the piss-poor
music selection on the radio at the time, and one expounded on the whole Apple vs. PC divide and the unusual anger
between the factions. I had the typical links page (called exactly that on my site), and I had some ideas
for future additions. Figuring that others will want to link to my page as well, I created an image that
I felt would secretly depict me. Sadly, the teddy bear in an empty bookshelf depicted me during a rather
bad time in my life, self-image and in a few other manners. I don't think much of anyone actually used it,
and it's probably just as well.
I saw other people using it and tried it out for the sake of something
different. From the second to the third incarnation, the frames disappeared. I started removing the
various satanic imagery from my site. The e-mail image ("Lord of this World" at right), along with
the lines of flickering fire, changed. The former moved to something cleaner, to where I replaced the animated
fire lines with something static and, hence, less bandwidth-hungry. By the second incarnation, I used tables
to organize my information in a more useful manner. My page index, which started in the middle of the main
page, ended up on the left side. "Summer Holiday" remained on the page and continued to loop.
changed from the non-vaguely satanic to something more
along my lines of humor. My title image, below left, retained the cool daemon, but I replaced the pentagrams
with smilie faces. I introduced light blue text in my second incarnation, but that really didn't work too
well with the black background or, in retrospect, with the red title images. I do think, however, that I
introduced my "About..." pages as separate pages on my site.
