Web History
My first experience with a computer was when I was merely five years old. It was an old BBC computer, using a program with a tomato. I don’t remember the name of the program, but I know it had a tomato and you could tell it to do things like jump, run, and explode. The explosion command was my favourite.
Since then, I’ve always used a computer wherever possible. I learned IT quickly at school and was usually the first in my class to complete computer-related projects.
I never really used the internet until senior school (showing my age!) when we used search engines like dogpile and altavista to do research for school. This was way back when comic sans, frames, and paper-patterned backgrounds were all the rage. Links were blue, fonts were big, and CSS was probably not even invented, or at least not widely used.
My first experience of webdesign was on freewebs. My site exists to this day, though I’m reluctant to give out the URL because it’s so embarrassingly awful. I thought pagebuilders were the only way to make a website. I thought geocities was cool. I thought tripod was the best host out there.
After joining my first internet forum and ’showing off’ my site, a girl named Anna sent me an email showing me some basic HTML coding, such as the anchor and image tags. She’s now my best friend (but not because of her HTML knowledge).
I worked on a couple of projects with Anna before branching out on my own two little feet, hoping for the best. I had an awesome (it really was. 10px font. table layout. bright pink.) site which was hosted on Zeeblo. Zeeblo were a fantastic host. They had cpanel, support for php, a mysql database, a helpful community, and no adverts at all. Life was good.
Then one day Zeeblo suddenly disappeared. Where was my site? For that matter, where was Zeeblo’s site? Everything was gone. My beloved site, my poor baby, was lost for good.
After spending a couple of months sulking and moping, wondering why life was so cruel, I had a break from sitebuilding to concentrate on my a-levels. After that, and much searching for a better free host, I found funkyvision, which is where I was up until July 2007. I outgrew what funkyvision could offer me, and moved to paid hosting with site5.
I read as much as I could about how to create a website. I learned how to write proper XHTML. I learned why div’s were good for layouts, and tables were bad. I learned about semantics, and how to make my site accessible.
I now spend most of my free time coding and designing websites, much to the annoyance of those around me. I like it though. To me, it’s fun. I’d much rather be curled up with my laptop, muttering at Internet Explorer and Firefox for not acting the way I want them to, than outside in a group of people, lurking around outside newsagents smoking.
At some point in the future I would love to undertake some formal training in web design or information technology. I have a huge passion for computers and all that they can do. I’m just not sure where to start. I have all the ‘basics’ down, so would I find the first part of a course patronising? Then again, I do learn better on my own, so maybe I’ll just keep reading around and trying to improve my skills.
