What made me want to make this little place?

Thinking about it, part of it is that I'm turning 25 this year. I think it could be plausibly said that I'm one of the first kids to genuinely grow up with the web: I've had access to the net since '97 or '98 when I was 2-3 years old. This site isn't about preserving and appreciating the "good old days" of the web before it went corporate, when I was that 2 or 3 year old I spent the vast majority of that time on the web sites for Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I think the best way I can describe the sites I'm trying to capture here is the utopian era of the web. Back when the web was going to break Microsoft's monopoly and unite the world, infinite information would be at your fingertips (people really thought this,) and you could create your own little website by fiddling around, learning from view-source, and copy/pasting to share with your friends and the world. Remember that even on Myspace when you signed up you were friends with Tom. By the time Facebook and Twitter came around and dominated social media, any pretense of the web being this personal, shared experience was dead.

That's not to say that it was some lost utopia. There was more than enough hatred in those days, but it was better segregated into echo chambers. The internet today is far poorer and far less white, and it’s much better for it. I just wish that it still had that close, personal feel that it used to.


But this page is ugly!
Why?