As most of you know, I also run the Splatt site which, I’m going to guess, generally gets more hits than this page. That site gets about 500-700 unique visitors a month, according the to stats my host keeps for me. Now, I don’t have one setup for this site, though maybe I ought to look into it just for kicks.
However, when I was about 14, I created my first website that I continued to refine and maintain up until about the year 2000. Even by then, I was barely updating it. I have since abandoned working on the site, though for posperity I have kept it up. In its heydey, it used to actually be a source of a lot of e-mail for me. The one page that got the most traffic was my 80s music pages. Since is was extremely unhip to like 80s music in the mid 90s, especially for a young teen, it was my expression of individuality. Being part of the 80s music fanbase on the internet was my only refuge from my friends’ utter disdain for it (since then, and not surprisingly, most of my friends have even come to accept some 80s music as quite good). The main attraction to my site was, simply, a big list of 80s songs. It wasn’t organized in any particular fashion, but it struck a nerve with a lot of people because – all on one page – was a list of all their old favortie songs, and the very mention of them brought back memories. I even became sort of an 80s music answer man for a while. People would e-mail me with lyrics as best as they could remember from a song and, 9 times out of 10, I could tell them exactly the name and artist of the song.
I also had a Peanuts fanpage on the site that featured character analysis of the Peanuts characters. I wrote it when I was 15 and I have never edited it since. Somehow that also attracted a lot of attention. When Charles Schulz announced his retirement from doing Peanuts, Internet Tonigh on TechTV did a piece of Peanuts fan sites, and one of the sites mentioned was mine! My website had appeared on TechTV, which was a really big deal for a high school computer geek. I generated quite a bit on traffic on that as well.
Another relatively popular part of the site was my HTML tutorial page. It was meant to explain HTML in layman’s terms, and in a straight and forward manner. I used to originally help some friends who wanted some lessons, so I created the page one night and miantained it from time to time. It turned out to be extremely helpful to a lot of people who stumbled on the page, and I got many e-mails from complete strangers about it. What was really great, though, was finding out that my fellow schoolmates was using my HTML tutorial page as their guide for doing a webpage project. The fun part was, the teacher was trying to teach them HTML as well, but they found my tutorial more helpful, instead!
To some degree I miss those days, because the Internet was a much different beast back then. There was no worry about spam, pop-ups, etc and it was a more trusting and intimate place to be. Complete strangers with similar interests found no problems e-mailing each other or posting up their contact information in public places, and so there was often more feedback for doing these things. Even the Splatt page used to get all kinds of great feedback from people around the world, but the culture of the internet is no longer the same. At this point it’s all been said and done. Having a website for our group of friends was a really, really neat thing back then. Now, it’s a pretty common idea.
Anyways, I’ll tell you what prompted all of this. My old site has been moved to the splatt.org server – specifically, it’s hn.splatt.org. I put it there and have since more or less forgotten about it. I was looking at the stats for the Splatt site today, and ventured into the part of the stat program I barely look at: the subdomain stats. There was hn.splatt.org, and I clicked it just to see what kind of traffic it was getting.
My old site, the one I built when I was 14 and have not touched in four years, still gets more traffic than the Splatt site. Consistently. It gets about 700-900 unique visitors a month.
