When I was in high school, my best friend and I decided it would be *so much fun* to learn HTML and create our own websites.
Mine was fantastically bad, but I was so proud of it. I knew how to center everything (because I’m more Type A than Monica Geller), change fonts and sizes, as well as text colors, add a crazy background, and even have midi music playing when you were on the page. Nevermind how annoying it was when you navigated to another page, only to navigate back to the homepage and the music started over from the beginning again.
We were both obsessed with Sailor Moon at the time, so that theme was kinda there, too.
I would give (almost) *anything* to be able to see that website again. In case you’re wondering, yes I did search for it, knowing it was futile. I mean, the page was created when Alta Vista was the bees knees for a search engine…and the other one that had the black lab as the mascot…can’t remember for the life of me what it was called…I think it started with an “L”…? Aaaand thank you, Google: Lycos.
But, yes; our pages were hosted by Angelfire (fo’ free; we were teenagers and had no money) and I’m sure we maintained them until we got bored of it.
So, all this to bring me around to what I spent my weekend doing: building this website. It was fun finding the skin (i.e. the pre-built aesthetic of the website; I won’t even try to pretend that I built this from scratch). Not so fun was realizing that I started installing plugins and widgets in the wrong order, causing me to reset the website yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t that big of a deal, though, since I hadn’t really customized it too much yet; it was more annoying than anything. Also not so fun were the site security errors I started getting last night and this morning. But, the hosting service has 24-hour tech support, so I took advantage.
At this point, this site is good enough. There are a few things that really bug the heck out of my Type A-ness, but I gotta pivot back to working on Book 2 since I’m on the editors schedule for the beginning of February. Gotta focus!
As time goes on and I have more time to play around with this, I have no doubt I’ll figure out how to fix those things that make me twitch…with a grand face-palm, I’m sure, because I suspect they are pretty simple if only I knew how to do it.
Thanks for reading! Comment or share if you or someone you know also used WebCrawler to do research for a school assignment back in the day. Those are my peeps.
Leave a Reply