A History of Web-Weaving

Over the years, making a Website has always been a periodic interest of mine, so I decided to make a quick page recounting the stories of all my sites/pages over the years. This page is inspired by Bytemoth's similar page, so go look up that page as well!

2016-17 - The Weebly Days

Sometime in 2016, I got it into my head that I somehow was going to be the next big YouTube celebrity. (To this day, i have no clue how I got that idea into my mind.) Anyways, I signed up for a YouTube account and made some pretty crappy videos to upload. (Seriously, I uploaded 5 videos, all of them horrid, in my first day of having a YouTube account. Thank God, I privated those bad ones.) Anyways, a while later, I felt that making a Website would be the perfect match to YouTube. Since I didn't really know any HTML, I signed up for Weebly. And oh boy, was my Weebly site terrible!

I was obsessed with Scratch at the time as well. If you don't know, Scratch is a drag-and-drop programming tool made for kids and preteens that we were using in my computer class around that time. (Fun fact: that's where I came up with my username! We used it for computer class in elementary school, and I came up with purplehello98 because I loved (and still love) the colour purple, and then chose a random word and a random number to round it off.) Anyways, I was part of a group of people who made fake OSes on Scratch, and I had links to all of my big projects on my Weebly page. I also considered myself some sort of Wattpad personality, so I embedded my Wattpad joke books, and my Adopted by DanTDM fanfiction series. (Seriously. Who let me use Wattpad again?)

Actually, I did shortly try to learn HTML towards the end of this era. I had a page (aptly titled my "HTML-ONLY page!") on the Weebly site where I gave HTML a shot, but I quickly dumped that after some Weebly thing faffed it up. (I hate Weebly.)

2018 - The Blogspot Era

I ended up drifting away from Weebly, kind of just letting it sit there til now, and for the rest of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, I didn't really do any Web development. But then, in March, I randomly decided to become a blogger. I used my G-Mail to sign up for Blogspot, and I was off to the races. Again, like with the early days of my YouTube channel, but even moreso this time, I had a problem of overloading the blog with content at first until the well suddenly ran dry, and I was left sans ideas.

Of the 22 blog posts I did in 2018, 17 were in March. Around this time, I got into art (I received a drawing tablet for Christmas 2017), and ended up posting some digital drawings on my blog. But though my love of drawing outlasted my blove of Blogspot, that, too, faded away.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I ever got many views on my Blogspot. I had 3 followers, if I recall correctly: 2 classmates, and my school e-mail. And I didn't post that much after March 2018, so it kind of just drifted away. I tried to make a comeback in 2020, but that didn't last very long and I soon privated it.

2019-20 - Actually Learning HTML

After dipping my toe into the HTML pool with Weebly, I dived in in February 2019. I had found some site form the 90s hating on Internet Explorer years before and the old-style aesthetic of the site was rather interesting to me. This is where my love of the old Web got its launchpad. So I signed up for an obscure free Web host called Awardspace (I wasn't yet aware of geocities.ws, Neocities, or any of those) and I was on my way. My grasp of HTML at this time was admittedly rudimentary (understatement of the century), so it... wasn't exactly the best-looking site on the Web.

I used a program called HTMLive by Phillip Adams of the YouTube channel OSFirstTimer, who, by the by, make really great videos! Anyways, basically, on one side it had the HTML source code, and on the other side it had a browser that updated as you changed the code showing what the page looked like when opened in a Web browser. Anyways, one of the hallmark features of my old Website was a purple marquee across the top saying "PurpleHello98". My homepage also had a bit too much white space (I was a little too fond of the br element), but overall, though it was somewhat crappy, it helped me learn a solid amount of HTML and start loving the old Web!

I kept up that site for about a year and 8 months (the first update was February 2019 and the last one was October 2020), but I soon drifted away. One of the big factors of that is likely that there wasn't any community there. Unlike Neocities, there wasn't any sort of thing whereby you can see sites belonging to other users of the same host, and you certainly couldn't follow their RSS feed or anything of the sort. My site felt kind of isolated then, and I guess that's part of why I stopped updating it. If you really want to see it, and I'll warn you, it's very ugly, you can find it here.

2021-present - Finally Using Neocities!

I first marginally found out about Neocities in January 2020, and signed up. While I didn't move my old site over and kept the whole Awardspace thing up, I did make an account then. After I drifted away from Awardspace, I wasn't involved in the Web for a while until January 2021. At the very beginning of the month, I rediscovered Neocities and remembered my old account. I logged back in and decided to get down to business. And so I dusted off my HTML skills and got down to business creating the first version of this site.

It's undergone quite a few revisions since then, as you can see below with a screenshot from the very first version of this site (which I've retroactively numbered 0.1) once I started working on it! (My birth name is blocked out below because duh.)

And this brings us up to now! I've kept up my Neocities site and I love it! Neocities has a real sense of community, and I've talked with so many lovely people on this platform and in this community. I've loved making my site so far and I love this community! I'm so excited for what's to come :)