personal history of websites

wide open french doors lead toward a glass-roofed courtyard, flooded with greenery and preened flora spilling over into the walkways. above, the sun is somehow perfectly placed in the sky to have beams of sunlight shining through stalks of green. in front of each plant lining the walkway, a photo and brief description on cardstock sticks out of the soil.

geocities (1998)

my first experience with web design—since code felt daunting—was on geocities, which when i finally encountered it, had drag-and-drop functionality to create webpages. my main motivation behind having a geocities site was to participate in the vikimouse digital dollhouse community, but instead of dolls, it was little digital houses for mice using image maps. one of my fondest memories was exploring folks' vikimouse houses, that were often alongside small fictional stories made up about the mice families. super wholesome, and i loved browsing the web to see others' vikimouse houses and collections.

msn groups

i'm not sure how long it existed before i fell into it, but there was a brief moment in my digital tenure where i was part of a text medieval fantasy roleplay, but the roleplayers used msn groups.

i remember the msn group being set up in such a way that each navigation item lead to a chatroom that was indicative of that "space"—of course, the tavern was the most popular spot for the roleplayers to hang out. but there were other ways to navigate through the site and get the lore you needed to participate in the overarching stories that were occurring there.

this kicked off the idea of starting my own roleplay website, even if it was really only static webpages with links.

expage.com (1999-2002)

i first found expage on the path to create my own link-based text "game." expage was a quick host with limited HTML functionality, and all you got was one page per account and URL. each page you created would be at expage.com/%pagename%. i started work on a horse ownership/stable "game," where depending on which links you clicked, took you down different paths of roleplay. you "earned money" by following certain links that built up your bank account (usually by training others' horses or doing a competition show), and you could "spend" your money at the tack shop or to add things to your stable.

thinking back now, a lot of inspiration came from the choose-your-own-adventure books i loved as a child, and i could directly glean inspiration in how to handle certain aspects of a story through a CYOA "game."

eventually, though, i stumbled upon the personal web side of expage, which would change my life forever.

at the height of me learning about the internet, one thing stuck in my mind very clearly: do not reveal any personal information about you. while i was happy to share intimate details about my life, i was smart to change my name. this part of my life, i referred to myself as rebecca/becca (listing myself often as beccerz) to help shield my online life from my real life.

my first expage, though the URL has been lost to time, was themed around lemonade. the site was called lemonade odyssey, and i used a free layout that someone gave out on their website that was actually covered in lemons. it was there i somehow inserted myself into the cliques that were fostered there, groups of girls coding and gossiping in AIM chats. these were the folks i ended up getting the most inspiration from, especially as we were all incredibly young and hiding it from each other, just coding websites whenever we'd get home from school and talking in IMs. (i still keep up with two of my closest friends from this era!)

at some point, i migrated to /c0cac0la, another beverage theme. i somehow bounced around from envy.nu/beccerz and expage around the end of this time.

angelfire (2001)

i had a brief foray into angelfire where i had a hate site, inspired by a britney spears hate site, which is shockingly still up. hate sites were shockingly common on a wide range of topics and subjects; angry rants were really popular in the '00s. still looking for remnants of that hate site, which i am sure is wholly embarrassing!

mint-chill.net (2002)

my first domain at age 11 had very little substance outside of being a host for people to host their sites on and a rudimentary blog talking about only things 11-year-olds would talk about. during this time, my layouts featured a giant image and small text that was laid over the image. unfortunately, most of the images have been lost to time.

lose-yourself.org (2002-2004)

named after the eminem song for some god-awful reason, it started as a group blog between me and my two best friends, stefanie and emily (who, at the time, went by "tori"). this domain was the longest-held that i had; surprising, based on the name.

once the group blog was essentially abandoned, i turned l-y.org into a personal domain network.

joygasm.org (2004-2005)

i wanted to continue the group blog concept, so we moved forward with moving that aspect to a different domain, joygasm.org. this was soon abandoned in lieu of just a personal site once i finally left l-y.org.

myspace (2006)

my myspace is a serious blast from the past. not only was i coming into my own as a teenager, i had recently been pulled out of public school due to bullying. there was a lot of self-expression as a young queer person as i was learning to come into my own as a 15-year-old, though lying about my age that i was two years older. i was so mature for my age.

the quilting bee v1 (2006)

the first time i joined the quilting bee in 2006, i was bee #193. unfortunately, a lot of my pixels are lost to time. if you have any of my patches, please let me know. this community was so awesome to me, and i loved being part of it.

miss-behaved.net (2006-2007)

m-b.net was my little oasis with pixel art. i started the pixel bakery, a pixel clique where folks would trade their individually-pixeled desserts and baked goods. i also had a few text cliques to try and contribute to the personal web climate at the time.

as far as my blog went, i was beginning to feel more confident about what i could post, and things became much less depressing to read. i began coming into my own as an arrogant teenager, which gave me some unearned confidence with sharing parts of my life. unfortunately, a lot is lost to time.

ihtp.org/makeshift (2007)

emily hosted me on ihavetopee.org/makeshift after i stopped paying for m-b.net. i liked the lack of responsibility after hosting people for six years, but i transitioned to a more "grown-up" blog format for this website.

quilting bee v2 (2007)

the second time i joined the quilting bee, i was bee #41. i'm very grateful for the quilting bee being archived, as it's how i was able to kind of piece together my past.

alex.crimsonietta.net (2008)

while preparing to go to college, i spent my senior year in a cms at alex.crimsonietta.net. i tried to have a self-hosted blog outside of the livejournal ecosystem, and i seemed to keep up with it for a bit of time. this was my last personal site that i remember before i completely transitioned to a professional portfolio when i went into college.