My friend and Viddler team member Kyle Slattery recently relaunched his Web site. He explains his thoughts on the design and development in this post, which got me to thinking. Having your own Web site is a truly awesome thing.
Especially on today’s Internet. I’ve had "my own site" for as long as I’ve ever been online. It all started on some Geocities and Tripod powered sites in the mid-90s. Then, when I switched from using AOL (read: When I finally realized AOL was not the Internet.), I used some shared space on Prodigy.net, my ISP at the time. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of Web development and purchased a domain (then called colinspage.com) for around $70 per year.
Fast forward about a year and a few of my friends put together a Star Wars related news site called thehutt.net. I didn’t help out too much with the design and development but I did write some for the site. It wasn’t long after that when I wanted to scratch my own itch and had my own blog. Which ended up turning towards theubergeeks.net, and now I have cdevroe.com.
I think having your own Web site is a valuable thing, especially for those of us that work on the Web. It helps you stay in touch with what people are going through when they want to publish content online, edit some code, or even customize an open source project. There are countless lessons to be learned by having your own site to fiddle with.
Great work Kyle. I’ll check in on you and your site(s) in 14 years.
Source: Kyle Slattery.com.