I have nothing to do anyway so why don’t we get on with the customary tradition of making the first post as the “Welcome to my Site” post. I’m not so sure how this so called tradition came about, but I’m guessing it started during the internet boom in the 90’s when everybody who has an internet connection back then wanted to create their own website. I’m sure most of you remember how the old websites look back then. Just think about Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire. These were the early website hosting providers capable of hosting a few MBs of disk space. I don’t know if there was a consensus on designing webpages on this era, but the colorful repeating backgrounds with animated GIFs scattered around the whole page are common features of a homepage. Big neon-colored headers that almost fill the 800×600 resolution of monitors back then. And don’t forget the classic “Sign my Guestbook” links. Leaderboard banners of advertisements loading on the top of the page were the trademark of free web hosting. Static HTML pages were the only way to go, no free server-side scripting was available. And of course, web browsing wouldn’t be complete without Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Come to think of it, every time I visit a personal homepage, the main page would almost always include a variation of the phrase “Welcome to my homepage!” When I start to ponder, most of the people who make “homepages” back then just make them for the sake of it. They just create their personal web space just because it was the fad. Even if they don’t have anything to share the world, they still dedicate a page to show something about themselves.
But after nearly two decades, much has changed. Blogs and social networking sites allows us to do the same purpose but without the eye-murdering web design. New concepts has evolved due to the necessity that the web brings us. Although a lot has been constantly changing, the “Welcome to my Site” pages still won’t fade that easily especially to those, like me, who are literary-challenged and have nothing to special to share the world.