Some of my old, “forgotten” web pages were never removed. They were just abandoned and as I research while I write this blog, I may discover they are finally actually gone or I might find they still exist in some capacity. I actually hope they are all gone. And the key word “forgotten” might certainly come into play but if I don’t remember them I surely won’t be mentioning them.
My very first web site was excitedly made when I discovered, in a book about the world wide web, that I could actually make a web page using something called HTML (hyper-text markup language)! I couldn’t believe I could do that, and so I bought books about HTML and learned more about how to code. The tags that didn’t stick in my brain, I could easily look up in the book, over and over as needed. One of my earliest web sites I recall had a gif that said “Proudly Published Using Notepad”.
Since I had no real need for a website there was no substance to it really. These were called personal web pages back then. Soon after that MySpace – then Facebook – made personal web pages pretty much obsolete. But for the time being, regular people could actually get their lives onto the World Wide Web!
Because of the lack of any important information, it was entitled Wayne’s Nothing Page (WNP). There were animated gifs (wow!), colored background and text, hyperlinks (I just called them links, cuz I was cool) to other websites, more meaningful websites, making mine less of a nothing page by association, the weather via a snippet of code from a weather site (probably weather underground but I don’t remember). Oh yeah and a guestbook! What respectable personal web page didn’t have a guestbook?
It’s possible I could find the original HTML code somewhere on one of my old hard drives. Ask anyone that knows me, they’ll tell you I’m very sentimental and find it hard to throw things out…especially firsts or lasts.
I checked and Google didn’t turn up anything about Wayne’s Nothing Page. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in some archive somewhere, but probably not. I think it was hosted on my first non-AOL web provider and I’m pretty sure they’re history*. Ahh, I remember the sweet song sung by those 14,400 Mo-Dems…sigh.
*Actually it was called Galaxy Internet Services (gis dot net) and Google says a company by that name exists…whether it’s the same one or not, I don’t know. But we’re talking mid to late 1990’s-ish, so…
That’s all I recall about WNP at this time.
The next one was Wayne’s Web (WW). It was very much the same idea, ie; a “nothing page”. I think I kept it up a little longer. Thinking about it, it may have evolved from WNP into WW, but I am pretty sure it was on a different host…a separate host from my web service provider, called Fortune City dot com. I know I have seen this html code on one of my old drives in recent years. If I find it, maybe I’ll revive the site, just for this blog. Update: I found a folder called Wayne’s Web in a folder called My Websites on my external drive in a folder called something like old HDD, but it only contained a few unrelated files. I would have to dig deeper I guess.
Well, thanks for reading. Time for you to wake up and get to bed. Haha. More of my web history coming soon. Woohoo! w~