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| LinkExchange Member | Free Home Pages at GeoCities |
Get your own Free Home Page
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| LinkExchange Member | Free Home Pages at GeoCities |
This homepage was first created in late 1996. I was in my second year of university and had gone up to the 24 hour computer centre to check my email. I was surfing around the internet and came across Geocities. I registered and claimed my 1meg of web space, soon after I got around to writing a basic homepage.
The American military connects two computers together and they immediately crash. Thus the Internet was born.
A British physicist at CERN in Switzerland invents the World Wide Web as a method of sharing data internationally over the Internet. Before long the blink tag is invented, polarising the internet community.
Early on in the history of the web, a site was set up to provide free web space. Originally called something like Beverly Hills Internet, it soon changed its name to Geocities and set up a number of communities covering a range of topics.
I had wanted to create my own homepage since I had started at university, and I had my first chance soon after. I convinced the webmaster to publish a page I had written about my hall of residence, Williamson House. Two years later I downloaded the page from the old server and gave it a new home on this site.
Full on war erupts between the anti-blink campaigners and people who want to create really hideous flashing pages in HTML 1.0. The blink tag is eventually eradicated from all but the darkest corners of the web.
After discovering Geocities, I staked my claim on a plot in the College Park community - number 5014. College Park was the community for students. My original username was pauljames, but the address was the cumbersome http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/5014/.
The first version of this homepage was very blue and didn't use frames. I had a whole megabyte of space, but it only took up a few kilobytes, so I kept adding things. Soon after, I applied for and received Featured Page status, giving me even more space.
Faced with a vast unfilled space and a very low hit count I created the first spin-off from the site, Drinking Games and registered it separately on Yahoo!, instantly increasing hits by about 10 times.
At the beginning of 1997, I learnt about Frames and JavaScript. Version 2 of the site was born, swapping blue for white and adding frame navigation. To test my limited JavaScript knowledge, I wrote the Prob-O-Tron.
In the summer of 1997, I signed up for a 250 mile cycle ride with some friends. Seeing the potential for a new page, I created the second spin off: The Cycling Thing. Along with its sequel, Forest Of Doom, it was the last major addition to the site.
Between September 1998 and September 1999, I was studying for an MSc and too busy to add anything until Forest of Doom in April 1999. By the end of the year the page was looking a bit old and tattered. So version 3.0 was born, replacing the frames with a complete new look.
Meanwhile, there were changes at Geocities. A new look with a new logo, the Geocitizen. However, within a few weeks the Geocitizen was gone, never to be seen again - Geocities had been bought by Yahoo! and was rebranded as a section of that Internet giant. My Yahoo! username, paulmjames, became the new id for the site, with the new address http://www.geocities.com/paulmjames/.
No longer a student, I updated the page less often, but new sections appeared, such as the Mexican Trilogy.
Has it really been 5 years? Well, not until October...