I actually spent quite a long time yesterday in moving poetry over to this site. What I found simply amazing about the whole process was that I was actually forced to restart my pc twice just in the time I was working on it. Make no mistake, my system really is a dinosaur, boasting a hefty 466mhz processor and 256 megs of ram, but come on. I had to load every page from my free site to be able to view the html source for it, that led to being bombarded with all those damn pop-up things (which I closed) that appear to eat pieces of your system memory even after you close them. I am certainly no pundit on this matter, if I am wrong about that please let me know.
The thing is that I can surf for ten or twelve hours over regular sites, then throw in a game like say DiabloII and play it for a few hours, and still have more system memory left than after viewing about fifteen pages on an angelfire site. It could be that it is just my crappy windows 98 system, but I kind of doubt that, considering that lots of people are still using that OS and don’t have any problems with the actual surfing either.
I do not know a damn thing about java script (that’s how they make those annoying pop-up ads), but I do know about actual JAVA programming though. In JAVA one of the most important things to do is to DISPOSE of content on close. It is a very easy thing to do, in JAVA code it requires only one line ” Public Void Dispose () “. Some sites do not do it though, I can recall having played a few games at SmartGames and my pc just totally freezing just a few games in (I don’t know if they ever did fix that, so you may want to avoid that link). I don’t know if they can do something similar with java script, but it would be nice. To be fair, though, when I went in and blanked my internet history and downloaded files my system got back to an operable state, but why should I as a user have to do it? Perhaps that is why those free sites are far less popular than they were 5 years ago.
Back in the day (I hate that damn phrase as much as anyone else, but it is fitting), my angelfire site had only a banner on each page. Fast-Forward eight years or so and they have about 3-4 ads popping up on every single damn page. I guess that they eventually figured out that no one was going to click on such a passive thing as a banner, and they are correct, we now frantically click on those pop-ups, just on the close button, how this could possibly help them?? Perhaps a couple of people miss the close button and actually load the page?
To be fair to the free sites, I must also mention that they have been constantly adding disk space, easier image hosting, better devolopment tools, and many other features. The thing is that they are adding all that crap to try to draw in more customers to get their friends reading the site to click through the multitude of crap-filled pop-ups that they are adding as well. When I started my first free site, I had only (don’t remember the number at this point, so sue me) enough space to post all of the stuff I wanted there, and about a half a dozen large images, as well as a few midi files. Now that they are offering enough free disk space to hold MP3 libraries (though none actually allow those files), I am sure they probably taking it in the shorts.
I am not quite sure if I am going anywhere with this, so I will end it now. Suffice to say that I do not think the free sites will really be around in another 5 years. That is, they will be around, but no one will ever visit them, with the possible exception of the site developer’s friends and family.
As I have mentioned on this site previously, I ripped off a lot of the layout from BlackChampagne. I was hoping to be able to go on without ripping off any more ideas from the guy, but I was thinking that my nav bar was lacking, so I took the liberty of putting in a link to his site, as well as a “why mad” and “don’t care” thing. Those work together, and I plan to keep them like that until such a point as I am able to come up with something unique to put over there.
Fear not, dear reader (me, for the most part), I am well on my way to having other things ready to upload. They will all suck just as badly as what you are now reading, so turn away now if you must.
That leads me to the reasons that I don’t really feel so bad about ripping off his layout. 1)He has actual site traffic. 2)I have put up a lot of links to his site on the page. 3)He is a good writer/author and may someday make a living with his words. 4)He has not yet sent me a pipe bomb.