Memory Lane Part II

This entry is long but you might enjoy some of the old links and photos.

As I posted here, my reason for learning HTML was to offer another computer-related service to customers of our business. I got one client out of it. But that one client was enough to make me realize how much of a chore and headache this kind of business would be. Oh that man was impossible. He was always trivializing the work I did because he came up with the design. He created a one page ad in a graphics program, printed it out, and wanted his page to be that. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t just scan his printout and have that be his web site. I suppose I could’ve….. and maybe I should’ve, lol! But it was a constant headache for me. The phone calls, the not getting paid, the guilt trips. So I gave up trying to do this as a business. It wasn’t worth it for me.

I continued to learn html up to a point (I’m way behind the times now) and wanted somewhere to display my new skills. With the page I created for Jack on Orion, I pretty much used up all the space I had there. I think we had 5 megs of space and the big clunky graphics and midi files used that up quickly.

Rainy told me about GeoCities. Back then GeoCities was -not- owned by Yahoo. And it was a small enough community that there was a sense of family. Best of all it was a free place to host my web pages. They had a neat concept of “neighborhoods” to categorize their community of web pages. For example, if your pages were about computers, you’d move into Silicon Valley. Ours was about family, so I joined the Heartland neighborhood in the ranch section, house number 1218. They even had little vacant house graphics to click on when you chose your neighborhood. I loved it!

Needless to say I fell in love with GeoCities and the whole concept. I even became a Community Leader helping to monitor the content of the web pages in the Heartland neighborhood. At one point I think I owned one share of stock in GeoCities as part of my payment for being a Community Leader. But I digress.

Now that I had a new home for my web pages, I had no idea what to make the pages about. I was with an email group discussing ADHD because Kevin had been recently diagnosed as having ADD. (Later I found out he wasn’t ADD.) Being on the email list gave me the idea to create my pages about my experience with ADD. It was therapeutic for me to write about it but I didn’t want to abuse the email group.

So my first website all about us was born. Back then my online alias was always “Space” (for Spacey Tracie) thus the name, “Space’s Pages”. I had maintained an Updates section so you can basically see the time line of how the pages evolved. Note the annoying midi files here and there. It was all the rave to have midi files on pages back then man!

I created my first “blog” at GeoCities (’cept I didn’t realized that’s what it was). From August 1997 – April 1998 I posted about what my life was like with an ADD child. Those entries have been removed now and that section has been closed for a couple years. Lets just say that after reviewing those old entries, I decided it’s better left closed.

I could never find graphics that I really liked so I started exploring Paint Shop Pro to create and manipulate my own. I created a Free Graphics section because it was way cool to do then. :blush: Some are OK… some are really bad, lol!

I received several Awards so I decided to start offering my own Space’s Award of Excellence. I couldn’t keep up so had to close it down. The Winner’s List is still there… at least three pages worth! I don’t know how many of those winners are still around.

I went nuts joining Web Rings. Then when Princess Diana was killed I felt compelled to make a Memorial Page about her. :blush:

I made pages for Melissa too. She originally had her own site in “Enchanted Forest” which was just for kids on GeoCities. But then the “no kids under 13 without parental consent” rule came out. I didn’t sign the new consent form in time so they deleted her entire web site. I was pretty upset about it. I re-created it and moved her pages over to my neighborhood.

Eventually I stopped maintaining much at GeoCities. I created a page for Casey when he was born. I created one for when Jack proposed to me. And then one for Cody when he was born, but that’s about it. (Click around links at the bottom of the Casey/Melissa/Cody/Kevin pages for old photos.) By then Yahoo took over and did away with the neighborhoods. I had long since given up being a community leader and GeoCities just wasn’t the same.

Then I discovered the world of blogging (again). I created SpaceyBlog at Blogger but I couldn’t stand the limitations of being hosted at Blogspot.com. So I found Blog and moved Spaceyblog to where my email account was hosted. By then we had cable internet but the email service was so bad that we paid for separate pop3 accounts at Pacifier.com and that gave us a few megs of web space too. Eventually our email problems ironed out so we cancelled our accounts at Pacifier and decided to purchase our own domain. That’s how JacknTracie.com was born and I moved SpaceyBlog here. For over a year, that’s pretty much all I used our domain for.

But SpaceyBlog turned out to be a bad idea. Well, no, that’s not true. The idea was fine. But the way I used the space to freely post my thoughts wasn’t so great. Some people were hurt by some of my posts, and then things just got ugly so I closed it. For a while we did nothing with our domain except host a few images. When it came time to renew our hosting for a year, we decided to go back to our original idea of creating a family web site. On April 17, 2003, JacknTracie.com finally became used for what it was intended for.

The rest is history. My intention is to eventually bring both sites together here somehow (minus the midi files and any other annoyances). I just haven’t decided how I’m going to do it yet.