Well, here I am. I found this lovely little corner of the internet that I plan to call my own. I would like to thank flux from BlackChampagne for the design inspiration. I found his site one of the most easy to read and navigate that I have ever seen, so I emulated it. Note though, that I did actually search out some backgrounds that are more in line with my own tastes. I am sure that at some point I will radically modify this whole setup anyway, but it was obviously his inspiration that spawned my original (I mean first try, not unique.) site design. And not to steal from the thunder of the last statement, but, most of the pages I design use frames, and have a sidebar with all the links on it. I decided to go with a no frames set with this page because of something else that Flux had said about the difficulty to link to pages from a website with frames. It is my goal to get links to this page (or any page on the site) so I want it to be as easy as possible for people to find the correct URL for said linkage. Anyway, since I do all of my html-ing in notepad, I did not understand the majority of the stuff in the source of his page, and was forced to kind of wing it. The end result does remain that it really does look very similar to his set-up.
Now, as for why I decided to start a site, that honor would have to go to Geocities and not for a good reason. I have, of course, had a lot of free internet sites over the years, most of which do actually generate a bit of traffic. Not like a CNN or anything, but a decent amount for completely unadvertised free sites. Yet, for some reason, Geocities went ahead and shut down one of my pages on their server due to lack of updates. That is, I had not actually added or edited content to the page in ohh a couple of years or so.
I am sure that lots of people start those sites and never do actually change anything about them, ever. I had edited the site a bit over the years, and when people would email me inquiring about other stories that I had written, I would generally email them copies. I did not add new and original work to that site for an obvious reason. How could you possibly claim to hold a copyright on anything that you posted on a free site, where anyone could actually download and post it the same day as their own original work?
I thought briefly about making another free site to put the content on, and quickly scrapped that idea. Mostly because of the limitations on the size, content and profanity that every free site seems to have. It’s not like I really want to just throw around the "F-word” around like some sort of a South Park show, but I would like to think that I can speak my mind without repercussion.
That leads us to here, as it were. I am building an entire website because I got pissed off about an incident with one of those free hosting sites. Seriously, though, how many times do you see a link to a page on Angelfire, Geocities, Tripod , or any of the multitude of other free sites and actually click it? The answer, in my case, is zero. You get like four pop-ups per server at this point. And the better the “pop-up blocker” software gets, the more advanced the pop-ups become. Currently I will not click a link that I know goes to any of those free sites, for exactly that reason. Am I the only one who thinks that way? Time will tell.
On the up side, I suppose, I have freed myself from the shackles of the free internet service providers. On the down side, paying twenty bucks to register a domain name, then more per month thereafter to keep it active, seems like a lot of money to say "Fuck You Geocities". I will keep telling myself that it is the principle alone that led me down this path, but, I think that last quote might really have said it all. I must also mention that when you fight a battle on principle alone you are going to have to pay out of pocket for it.
I am still kicking around the idea of doing a blog feature on this site. I am just not sure if I actually will. I will certainly not post news items like flux does over there at Black Champagne, since if you really want to read news, there are a lot better places to find it than here. I am certainly not a scholar, and I plan to stay that way. I may just pick and choose days where I really get pissed off about something and, as such, ramble at length. Only time will tell.
I certainly hope they get this site set up pretty quickly though. I mean, I certainly can’t upload anything until I have the server in line. So the quicker they get it set up, the quicker I can get free, live, streaming animal porn videos on line, or not. More likely not.
Well there usually is a tomorrow….