Birdland

I was always the smart kid in school growing up and was always fascinated by math, engineering, and computers. Prior to high school, I had not been exposed to the internet.

Starting out in high school I got my first ever email address (the screen name was something really really stupid). Thus began my entrance to the world wide web.

It was also during this time that I became interested in building a website. I wanted my own piece of internet real estate where I build a personal website. Keep in mind this was before myspace and facebook made it cool to have an internet presence.

So where did I start? Geocities of course!

What you see is what you get…

For those of you who have trouble remembering, Geocities offered free web space and allowed a user to build a website using one of two methods.

The first method is how I got started and it is affectionately referred to as WYSIWYG (pronounced wiz-e-wig) stood for What you see is what you get. Think of opening a word document and creating a single web page on it, using their commands for bold, italics, insert image, etc. That was great for a couple of years, I had my own personal website that other people around the world could see.

A little side note…

I grew up in a very rural area in northern Arizona and didn’t have a dial-up connection at home. So I spent many of these early years playing around in an internet cafe inside of a Bookman’s. That’s right, I paid by the minute.

But after a while, I started hearing about writing markup to control how the page was rendered in the browser. So after asking around (my brother mainly) I discovered HTML.

Geocities offered a second method of creating web pages, a file manager. The user would code up a page, then upload it to the file manager and your page was displayed.

Expanding on that little side note…

Once I learned that I could code up pages in Notepad. I began writing a lot of my code offline at home and testing in a browser that wasn’t connected to the internet. When I was satisfied with what I had, I would then upload the new page(s) the next time I was at Bookman’s. This definetely saved me a few bucks (literally). This was actually a very good habit to get into, because you should always make sure your code is working before putting it on the web for everyone to see.

So I began playing with a whole bunch of new ideas. I bought a book on HTML and immediately began to learn the tags required to code up my page. I began to learn about HEX color codes. I started to flood the internet with every new design idea that I had. I must have had a completely new website every couple of months. This continued for the rest of high school.

Stay tuned for the next section where I will talk about taking my first baby steps in the web development world.