My first website

In honor of Groundhog Day, I retrieved the first website I ever created (from http://waybackmachine.org/) 15 years ago when we were using a 28.8/kbs dial-up connection to AOL. Each account had five usernames of 10 characters each, so I created grndhoglvr to put my fledgling interest in the web to use. So I learned HTML (3?) from some online tutorials and put together this site to proclaim my love for groundhogs.

The site had over 17K visitors, and I received poems from Groundhog lovers, declaring their love to creatures in their yard, and a couple of requests for radio interviews which I had to decline as I was in high school. We also had several requests for membership which I (regrettably) never monetized.

Good Times™

These days, I would buy a $9 domain, throw up a Wiki and open-source forums, and take membership payments through PayPal. All in less time that it took to understand the syntax and use of a tag…