Archive: Does Anyone Remember Personal Websites?
Greetings from April 24, 2025. Below is an old OLD post from a previous iteration of this site. I don't necessarily still agree with every word, but some of it holds. Anyway, enjoy!
I didn’t think so.
They really did exist, though. People (mostly idiots) would look at the internet and think, “Wow! What a great way for me to talk about myself, without actually talking to other people.”
Or, at least, I assume that’s what was going through people’s minds…
So these wankers would find places like geocities.com (which I hear no longer exists), that enabled the un-knowledgeable to create their own little waste of electricity.
Unfortunately, since geocities made it so easy to make a website whether you knew anything about what you were doing or not, the internet was becoming crowded with cut-and-paste, meaningless, awful websites. It’s not like they never existed before geocities, there was just a huge influx of them with companies like geocities around.
This was around the time I started using the internet. I only barely comprehended what “internet” really was. My girlfriend at the time had an e-mail account (like many of my friends), and wanted to send me junk that I would later learn to block, so she convinced me to get set up with a hotmail address. The only thing I had done on the internet before this was chat in a chatroom, and that was getting pretty stale. I really didn’t see the draw in this “internet” so far.
E-mail turned out to be kind of cool, once I figured out what was going on, but I wasn’t hooked yet. It wasn’t until we got a new computer, and I had a couple of friends over to show it off. I had grown fairly familiar with the internet so far. My feet were wet, anyhow. But while I was showing off the new family toy, one of my buddies said, “Hey! You should check out my website.”
“What do you mean?” was my immediate reply.
“My website,” he replied, taking over the keyboard to input the URL.
“Holy freaking crap!” were probably not my exact words. I didn’t realize people could make their own websites. In fact it wasn’t until that moment that it occurred to me that any of the few websites that I’d been to had obviously been created by someone. And if they can, why can’t I? I just never stopped to think about this before.
The next day, to geocities I went (because that’s what my buddy showed me). To my knowledge, at this point, this is the way to create your own website. I was so excited just to get this thing set up that by the time it came to actually enter content, it occurred to me that I didn’t have any. What the hell would I put on a website that anyone else would care at all to see? Hmm… Well, what did my buddy have on his site? Mostly rants about topics that didn’t particularly interest me. I’m all about a good rant, but his content involved paranormal whatnot, which I wasn’t about to start getting into. The only things that I was ever really good at were music and writing, and it didn’t look like you could somehow record music with this thing, so that was my brilliant idea: poetry. My very first website was nothing more than a single poem (written when I was 14-15, so you can imagine how good it was), and three links to other websites because that’s what was in the template I used. These links didn’t work, of course, because I had no idea what I was doing. So there you go, one new bad poem every week and three broken links. Pretty cool.
I figured out more as I went along – how to create real links, more than one page, etc. I eventually got more into the code and less into the template thing, giving me more options of how to present the site, and so on. Within a few months, the site had grown to several hundred pages of content – poems, short stories, theories, and the infamous Hate List were just some of the time-wasting wonders. I spent countless hours adding more stuff to this monstrosity of a website, and even people who weren’t me got a kick out of it.
I was impressed at how many people were out there using the internet who came across my website. Whether they liked it or hated it, the site even had “regulars”. The other cool thing was that even though people like me could create their own website, most people didn’t. They either didn’t want to because they didn’t want to learn, or didn’t have any content that anyone would actually care to see. Despite the fact that there were other personal websites out there, most people weren’t interested in having their own “space”.
That leads me to my next point: the demise of the personal website.
Despite the fact that most people my age still weren’t interested in having a website, there were a lot of websites popping up on these free hosting providers. I even moved my site around from server to server (usually to avoid having ads on my site), from geocities to darksites to angelfire to brinkster to angeltowns and finally to 50webs.com, where it currently resides and has for a few years now. There has been no shortage of places to store your website for the world to see. However, there was a notable change in how chumps like me got their own little piece of the internet. There was this new popular thing to do called “blogging”. Alright, it had already been around in one form or another for a few years by this point, but it had only recently shot into popularity. I took a look at it, and deduced that this is how everyone can now have their own “website”. Not really, but it sure made these bloggers feel like it.
So essentially, now, rather than spending countless hours crafting your own customized website with whatever content your little heart may have desired, you can post little more than a 12-year-old girl’s diary online. And that’s what the majority of these things were – pre-pubescent steamy piles of worthless tripe. The content was along the lines of “and like we like liked those boys like, and soandso was like totally hot like”.
Holy fuck! What happened to the internet? Like I said earlier, the average website wasn’t exactly the most insightful thing in the world either, but this was a whole new era of utter garbage on the internet! I refused to participate in this horrible new activity, despite the fact that as a writer it may have been a decent outlet for some of my work. I mostly just didn’t want to be associated with the blog-nuts. I even got mad when people referred to my website as a blog. Do you realize why people would do that? They didn’t know the difference. They just assumed I started typing a sentence just like they did, and viola! Website appear now!
Bastards!
If that wasn’t bad enough, along came these “networking” websites. Myspace was the first major one. Everyone was getting hooked on myspace – an even easier way for people to talk about themselves without actually talking to each other. That’s a whole other can of worms, by the way. What happened to the face-to-face conversation?
Myspace was nothing more than another money-making scheme. By having you input all of your favorite this and that, and connecting to all of your pseudo friends, marketers knew exactly which ads would be effective for whom. Ugh. That’s yet another topic I won’t get into here.
Myspace had grown to the height of its popularity by the time I was finally convinced to join. My cousin told me it was a great way for musicians to get their work heard by a lot of people. That’s what finally sold me, and it was true. For the first year or so I had a myspace music account, plenty of new listeners came my way. Alright, fine. I started to think myspace maybe wasn’t so bad.
Around this same time, another “social-networking” (money grabbing giant) showed up: facebook. By the time I started to ask all my friends why they weren’t active on myspace anymore, they had already abandoned one ship for another ship with a different color of paint on it. Everyone gave me the same basic response, too, “Myspace? Why are you still on myspace? You should join facebook!”
Jesis Christ! This is nothing more than internet fad bullshit! I drew the line there. I will not be part of this new internet trend in antisocial behavior. It’s turning people into idiots (among many other things, I know). More and more people no longer know how to interact with others in person. The reason seems obvious to me – rather than actually having conversations with people, rather than going and asking that cute boy/girl/sheep out on a date, now people just send each other messages (cell phones, laptops, etc. exacerbate all of this, of course). They also seem to collectively forget how to use all of the conventions of the written language. Symbols and acronyms now replace words. Spelling hasn’t mattered in years. There is no longer any use of the Shift key on keyboards. This has even spilled into spoken language where people phoneticize things like “lol”, heard as “LOLE”.
It’s gotten out of control, and it’s getting worse constantly. We all know it, but a small minority actually care. Everyone is just happy nodding in synchronization as they spew away the internet.
This reminds me of a great website: internetisshit.org
Anyway, time to rap this puppy up. I’m getting annoyed all over again, and I’m hungry. People should get the hell off of the internet unless they know how to properly use it. There are so many better things you could be doing than typing away mindlessly to your internet buddy list. Go do something useful for a change. I don’t care what, just get the hell off of the internet.
Or, if you’re going to stick around despite what I tell you, at least go visit a real website.