My Internet Page Anniversary

If you are young so missed the early Internet years and never saw bright coloured text on loud backgrounds then get out your sun glasses first.

It’s my first Internet page anniversary, the 19th April 1997. Today I am celebrating 19 years of building and publishing Internet pages.  Naturally found this date on the Internet from some online research leading me to www.oocities.org.  This site has an archive of old GeoCities pages no longer available. The oldest pages that have survived are ones from early 1999.

It is at GeoCities I taught myself to code html. This was before WYSIWYG editors and coding tables, style fonts,  images, links, and more. I learnt that pages needed to be lean to load on slow 28kb/s modems. How excited I was when I coded an image with multiple links.

I was so excited about this new technology. I had to show anyone that would hang over my shoulder and see me in action typing up a new piece of code and publishing it to my GeoCities place. Sometimes the pages were a mess as I deleted, moved and edited the few pages, to show off my skills and what you should and should not do. More on what not to do, later.

GeoCites was a free site to use and I was in the neighbourhood called Wellesley – “Women-related topics”.  The name came  from the Wellesley College, a private women’s liberal-arts college in the town of Wellesley, Massachusetts.* My user number was 2303.

GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo in 1999.  It had  38 million user-built pages and was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.  Ten years later it was closed down.*

I even knew to have an about page and here is what it said in 1999, in the original pink colour.

I have enjoy surfing all around the world visiting sites, chatting with other Net users and making friends. I thought it was time I made my own Home Page, firstly as a challenge to see if I could do it and secondly to stake my piece of cyber space.

I am really interested in Women’s Issues but have decided to learn more about page construction before I leap in further. Therefore, I have decide to break it into manageble tasks starting with a simple page with a few links and loading it into Geocities.

I believe that the Internet is not just for males and have found many competent females with high quality pages!

That was the ideology side but here is the facts: I’m a working mother who naturally has to share my time around my different responsibilities and interests. But wait……. here is a list of proposed improvements to this site……..any suggestions would be welcomed. Mail me or put a comment in the guest book if you like.

I learnt lots. I had forgotten I had a guest book and used bright pink font.I used wide borders on tables and cells. Then there was the use of odd coloured fonts and the little stars I used for dot points. The bright coloured page title images and worst of all, a starry background that made it hard to read.

Even that long ago I did not like to save others (better) images so created my own. Did I think the extra little dots around the images and letters made them look better? I cannot believe I would have put up with this. Must have been saving in the smallest gif file size possible to reduce load times.

I seemed to centre content and separated it with the line I created fading from aqua to pink with a few more of those dots.

I remember the quote for the month started as the quote for the week. I found the Internet is time consuming. I  discovered outsourcing long before it became popular. I outsourced my quotes by embedding someone’s quote. And yes they were happy to share. In the archived version of my site this no longer works so that is why the image with the quote is absent. This means image includes a broken image icon. It is not broken itself.

How did we share our sites?

You needed to tell your friends about your site. Share the link in chat room and join up to Web rings.  Web rings was how you found other sites with similar interests to you. For example I belonged to the Wellesley web ring.  It was from a fellow homesteader (the name for GeoCities users) I got my first web award. A super hero type, 40+, female computer nerd.

What’s happened since starting and this internet page anniversary?

My Internet Page Anniversary – gosh it’s 19 years since I built my first Internet page at GeoCities. Time has flown by. Here is hoping for another 19 interesting ones to come.  Since I started hardly a day has gone by “netless”. It was seeing a post by Jill Ball on her 20th anniversary that inspired this reflective post.

Much has changed on the Internet over the 19 years. I’ve  migrated through GeoCites, using a notepad, FrontPage, Dream Weaver and WordPress. Spent hours on  various image programs including Photoshop creating images with limited artistic talent. Built work web sites & online shops. Spent hours scanning borders before the manufacturers supplied images. Meet ADSL and VOIP before it was launched on the Australian Public. I have blogged, networked online and joined in social media.

What will the next 19 years bring?

(Sources: Wellesley College, Wikipedia, GeoCites, Wikipedia, and Fran’s Place)

Do you have any old web pages you created?