A new age, a new look

It's a sad day folks. Got an email the other day from Yahoo! letting me know that Geocities is closing. I'm not sure if that means much to you but to me that is a huge blow to the way things were. Way back in 1995 when I first transferred to the University of Maryland I was a business major. As such I was lucky enough to enroll in a course titled Management Information Systems. I'm sure this class would look very different today than it did 14 (seriously? 14?!!??!??!) years ago but back then it was all about using the tools we now all take for granted - Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and this new thing that was out there - the Internet. Yup, this was my first introduction to HTML.

As you can probably guess, I took to this class like a fish to water. I loved every minute of it! I spent all of my free time in the computer lab working on my project - a personal web page. The professor was so funny. He basically said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I don't know a thing about creating web pages so if you need any help ask the TAs, and they'll try to help but they don't know much either." I mean, it was 1995, there really wasn't anything available on the Web like there is today. Only a few well-financed companies had web sites. Most people didn't even have Internet access at work let alone in their homes. I was lucky enough to get a dial-up connection through UMD (14.4kbps baby!!!!) that timed us out after a certain number of hours each week. Ahhhhh... the good 'ol days of downloading something, going on vacation, and hoping it would be done when you got back.

So there I was, building my own web page without the help of anyone else. I went out and learned all I could on my own. Reading tutorials, books from the library, stealing code from other sites I found (totally legal by the way). And I built the coolest thing ever. It had all sorts of colors, marquees flying all over the screen, blinking text, horribly loud background images, it was by far the best project in the class. I got an A on that project because no one knew a thing about design. I really wish I still had that account open!!! I'd love to get a screenshot of that site but I didn't even know what a screenshot was back then. The TAs and the instructor were so impressed that I was asked to come back and be a TA for them the next year. But by then I had decided not to be a business major anymore so I dogged the final and got a B in the class and they said I couldn't TA without getting an A. Pissers.

What does this have to do with Geocities you ask? I built my first site on Geocities wayyy back then. I loved Geocities! I thought having free hosting was the best. I didn't even care when they started putting those little ad boxes in the upper right corner of the screen. I had my own little space and I worked on it all the time and I loved it.

This brings us today... Per the email they sent out, Geocities will be no more as of October 26, 2009. I mourn. And, I still have stuff up on my account! That was where I hosted some of the pictures and things that were on my blog before I made the switch to this new "design." And I was hosting some images from Wifey's site on there too. See that cool as hell banner I made for her? The one I turned into an image map? Yup, that's on Geocities! Yeah, we're going to have to figure out what to do about that. And with this change to Geocities came the realization that it was time for me to move to a new look over all. I'm not sure I'll stay with this white on black look, and I don't like how my tag cloud is only showing up in blue (see the box on the right), but I'll kick the tires for a little while and make a decision eventually.

Until then, let me know if this looks like a$$ or not.