Hello! I’m J, and this is my first blog here at my new online home, jchannell dot com!
But this is not my first blog – or even my first website. At 35, I’ve been using the web to communicate since I was 11 years old.
Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, Expages, Xanga, LiveJournal, Deadjournal, Tumblr, and countless forgotten free web hosts… I’ve seen ’em all. I can remember when animated GIFs were first trendy, then how everyone hated them only for them to return to their present meme dominance.
I didn’t even start making websites on the web. For my ninth birthday, I got a surprise gift of a computer. This was a big deal for a rural West Virginian kid craving a chance to use computers at home instead of having to make time at school or beg my mom to take me 10 miles into town to use a library.
However, this was not a state-of-the-art machine. It was an Apple IIe heading for the trash… in 1996. My teacher at school asked my mom if she wanted one, and she obliged.
I was happy to have a computer, but the biggest bummer was that it did not have access to the internet, so I couldn’t access all the cool burgeoning dot com websites I saw advertised on my TV. I made due by writing text-based BASIC programs that were my own idea of what a then-modern website would be on such an old machine.
To anyone who has yet to pick up on this, I grew up poor. For the Disney adults reading this, that means I was like Cinderella.
Building my first websites
The first actual website I made that could actually count was a single page I put together in Microsoft Word. I was on a grade-school field trip to a NASA technology park in Fairmont, WV. At some point, the hands-on lesson was sitting a group of kids in a computer lab and showing them how to save an HTML file from a Microsoft Word document.
I got encouragement from a chaperone mom about how my web page was the best in the class. She was right. Turns out, a room of elementary school kids was pretty bad at design and user interface in the mid-to-late ’90s. To our credit, looking back on it, everyone was.
Regardless, this was when the internet and digital communications became a focus for me. When I graduated to whatever grade in elementary school that allowed internet access, I became more fascinated and eventually capped on usage time. I can even remember sneaking around events at other locations that may have internet-capable computers, like siblings’ school events. I can only guess how many important phone calls were not connected at various institutions because a young J wanted to see if there was an update to the official Weird Al site.
In these early days of the internet, creating a website was a different experience than it is today. There were no content management systems as we have now. Instead, people had to manually code every aspect of their websites using HTML. To make things easier, websites like Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod emerged, offering users free web hosting and simple tools for creating their websites. These websites allowed users to create personal pages, share their interests, and connect with others online.
Each website builder had unique features and quirks, like Angelfire’s state-themed URLs, which allowed users to proudly represent their home state. My West Virginian pride may have made me interested in Angelfire as my first website outlet.
It didn’t seem like that big of a jump for a kid who learned to fix the VCR when they were 3 and coveted a newspaper they found with all of the cable channel’s addresses. And even less surprising, the things I was nerdy about as a kid became my gateway to the world once I discovered Angelfire.
Getting nerdy with Angelfire
Without many surprises, my first forays into making websites – and even digital communications in general – were my childhood obsessions with comedy, music, TV, and movies. My first personal website – hosted on my free page builder of choice, Angelfire- was full of me detailing my media obsessions. That led to my first experience making “fansites” and getting recognized.
A section of that early Angelfire website was devoted to my previously mentioned love of “Weird Al” Yankovic. I sent the page to Weird Al’s webmaster and drummer, Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz, who gave it a link on the official website. This was huge to a kid who didn’t see much beyond a rural hillside and dreamed of the exciting stuff they’d find on TV and other media.
From there, I became a fixture on the fan email list for the MTV show Sifl and Olly, affectionately known as Sockheads, in around 1998-1999. This group of folks from around the world helped to shape my future tastes and interests. It was one of the most supportive and kind fan communities, and something I felt fortunate to be a part of as I saw toxic internet fandom grow later in my life.
The show’s creators, Liam Lynch and Matt Crocco, and crew members like Patty Whisenhunt eventually subscribed to give us all inside peeks into the show’s creation. When I’d get personal interactions from them, it’d feel amazing that the people who worked to put something wild and stimulating on television took the time to reach out to me.
Of course, a Sifl and Olly fansite hosted on Angelfire followed.
My fandom became something significant in my life and development from there. One day, I sent an email that asked if anyone had thought about a tribute album based on the show. Within a week, I had a reply that would change my life and the Sockheads forever.
But you’ll have to subscribe and return to learn more about that in a future blog. I know how this whole reader-retention thing works. That is until I go back and edit this blog with a hyperlink for better SEO.