I’ve been working with the web for a long time.
My earliest memories of “creating websites” began in the year 2004. I was an avid Redwall fan and had just started learning about the web. I believe I started with Geocities, where there was an avid Redwall community springing up. I decided to start a “fact” website. There was a great deal of fan-fiction sites springing up, as well as countless numbers of phpBB forums. What I thought the community really needed was a wiki type site that would allow fans to find information about any Redwall character. This was before the actual Redwall wiki was started, and it was fairly well received by the community. I continued to move from technology to technology, always trying something new. I learned HTML, CSS, PHP, basic JavaScript and so on. My first non-GeoCities site used frames (yikes!), and then I moved to CSS divs (that was amazing). I tried out WYSIWYG editors, including RapidWeaver, iWeb etc. I probably spent almost every waking moment on this project, called “Redfacts.” That’s fascinating, because I can hardly find a trace of it anywhere these days. Most of the sites I frequented every day have all long since been removed from their servers. I don’t think I even have any archived versions of my site.
It’s amazing how the web has changed since then. We’ve seen the death of frames, Flash, and so on. It’s been a grand adventure so far, and I cannot wait to see what will happen next.
I’ll always be grateful for Redwall for igniting the creativity in me and spurring me to create websites.