Directory banner will go hereabouts. Gonna have to fire up the ol' MS Paint for that!
The date is December 25, 1998, and my sister and have just torn the wrapping paper off the massive box that's been sitting beneath the tree for a week, taunting us with green ribbons and shiny paper. Inside is a computer. I am confused at first - I am only seven years old, and in my mind, computers were for grown-ups to work on. But then we started getting games for them. As I got a little older, I started exploring the web, browsing through webrings for pages on topics that interested me. My favourite pages were the ones that had a variety of different topics, so I could learn about new things. It was always my dream to make a site of my own, but seven-year-olds do not often have the best discipline for such things.
The date is May 29, 2001, and I am sitting in the living room of our new house, trying and failing to decorate my Neopets profile. I can smell dinner, and I am sick of looking at the picture of Kagome that will not go where I want it to. As my stomach growls, I copy and paste the text from a premade petpage, and then log off so my sister can feed her baby usul before we get called to the table.
The date is March 10, 2002, and I am sitting in the school computer lab with a print-out of HTML terms propped up against the base of the computer monitor in front of me. I am making my first web page - a single page dedicated to the coolest show in the world, Inuyasha. It takes me three hours to get a few paragraphs of text, a table listing the episodes I've seen, and a few pictures 'borrowed' from another fansite. I am so, so proud of it, and in a few months, it will be gone forever, wiped off the computer during the school's end-of-year reset.
The date is August 19, 2008, and the aging fans of my computer are turning my bedroom into a sauna. I am working on a series of webpages for a world-building project. They are not fancy, just black text on white backgrounds that all link to each other like Wikipedia. It is tedious trying to wrangle the text in Notepad so I can read it without scrolling, but my world-building project has ballooned beyond the limitations of old three-ring binders and leftover looseleaf from the previous school year. I wipe the sweat off my neck and keep typing.
The date is September 9, 2013, and I've joined the group of people migrating from LiveJournal to Tumblr. I do not even bother trying to code my own page, I just spend ten minute browsing the free premades, and then get back to scrolling through Sherlock moodboards and Doctor Who memes.
The date is October 2, 2019, and I've just read a tumblr post lamenting the loss of the 'old web' and the sterile homogenization of social media platforms. I reach the end of the post and keep scrolling without thought. It is the first mention I have seen of this topic, but it will not be the last. A seed has been planted in my mind.
The date is August 8, 2020, and I have just deleted my tumblr.
The date is February 12, 2023, and I am tinkering with the petpage for one of my neopets. It is fun, but feels hollow - the site is crumbling, and I am unsure how much creative effort I'm willing to put into something that may be gone soon.
The date is May 10, 2025, and I'm turning thirty-five in eleven days. It has been two months on my new medication, and I am rediscovering the joy of creating things. The time has come to finally make that site I've always been thinking of.