Thank you for visiting.
I have a habit of creating new websites. It's probably due to my larger habit of diving into new projects. I just really like the first stages when you see something come to life out of nothing. Actually to be fair, I do hate the very first step when you're staring at a blank slate, but *right* after that it gets fun.
Right before creating this page, I was going back through my hard drive archives, as well as the Wayback Machine archive, to dig up whatever I could find. I managed to find the very first ones from Summer 1995. I remember the awe of
digging through the code from other websites, simply altering the text, and then making the connection between the tags and visual representation.
I hadn't been able to tackle programming as of yet, but this was so simple to pick up, and after
a few local html files, I was able to get a
family page on the university server where my dad worked. We each got an anchored section within a single page to post a picture and a few links. I desperately wanted my own page,
and soon got it. Then we moved to our local ISP, so we didn't have to put the files on a floppy disk and sneakernet them over. Then we got a domain name, and
my personal page grew.
This persisted until the free hosts started appearing; tripod, xoom, angelfire, and of course GeoCities. Per my first paragraph, it's not surprising that I opted for all of them. My first Geocities page was dedicated to Quake and the various mods and patches that I found. For pretty much the first time, I was building a content repository rather than a list of links that assuredly pushed any visitor right off my site. This page was called
AnarQuake (lovingly referenced here), and embarrassingly the next few years were very stereotypically spent with edgy teen rants and worldviews. But hey, it was the 90s. I think that was par for the course.
This led to a
3D game page since all the 'Quake-clones' were coming out soon. It was still more informational, but when I got a
Tripod account, I made that one dedicated to character images, painstakingly cut out from their background, and turned into transparent GIFs.
The original GeoCities account eventually seemed redundant, so I started the new trend of adding
news updates (suppose we'd call this blogging later), but that only lasted a few months. This was the one page for which I had to rely on the Wayback Machine.
After that, I joined forces with a Half-Life fan page, and grew that into a decent sized page until the game came out way later. I started trying to make web design a business opportunity, since stuffy adults couldn't understand tech stuff, and I ended up with a
million portfolio samples, which are awful by this point.
I made a ton more sites after that point, but they aren't worth mentioning really, since they are outside the web 1.0 aesthetic. So that leads us back to my first point; I still like creating things. I had been wanting to create a site to cover a lot of things I have liked and currently still do like, but was trying to think about the best way to do that. One of the benefits to static HTML is its resiliency to decay. Aside from the odd broken images, it doesn't rely on server specific needs like include files and databases. That said, I don't have an answer just yet, but it will have to wait because…
I found NeoCities! In my travels of digging up old websites, I found a few things that I would have included back in the day, but never got to. I was tempted briefly to alter the originals and flesh them out, but then I felt that it might be better to leave them as they were. So with another free web host, and its desire help us make fun websites again, I knew this would be the perfect spot. I do intend to make a more bloggy site eventually, but as I've said a million times by now, I'm not done creating new things.
Now for a name. Based on my old AnarQuake site, Dannarchy just popped into my head, and I thought that was so delightfully obnoxious, there could be no other name. My goal was to create an equally obnoxious edgy 90's kid website with horrific crude html, but plans never go… as planned. I joke on the front page that I'm throwing out the rules, and that's been true. Each spin off link has given me a chance to create a new design. The front page is a homage to my original website. The quake mods page is akin to my Geocities. Some of the links are more modernized, and even this page has made me happy with the header portion.
So the main goal at this point, is to target things that land firmly in the late 90's, early 2000's. Probably 1997-2001 +/- a year or so. It will be mostly games, some music, internet culture, and random things I've dug up on my hard drive that may fit in well here.
So here's to NeoCities, and all the fun we can have with it…
p.s. If you want to see my site archive back to the dawn of time,
check it out.
See also:
Dann's Home Page | Decemberized | Goshzilla
