On June 8, 2000, I registered the domain name BLUEFLOWER.ORG for the first time. I then set to work designing a new website to accompany this newly acquired domain name. After nearly a month's worth of designing and configuring settings, I posted my first weblog post using Blogger on July 3, 2000. It was a lot of work just to get that far, and that was only the beginning.

Over the next four years, I posted 1,230 weblog posts to this website. 1,196 of them were posted to the regular weblog, while the other 34 were split between two additional special projects. Sometimes insightful, sometimes silly, and sometimes outright inane, collectively these 1,230 posts are a reflection of both of my personal life and the popular culture of the times. For this reason, I have chosen to save these weblog posts and post them here rather than relegate them to the digital trash heap.

This, folks, is BLUEFLOWER.ORG CLASSIC. Not only will this site serve as the permanent home for all the weblog entries from my first four years, but it will also present a full-service history of this website. To the left you will see links to all 1,230 of the weblog posts. To the right are thumbnails of screenshots. The first two are websites which pre-date BLUEFLOWER.ORG, while the next ten are the first ten versions of this site. Click on any of them to read more about that specific version.

I knew essentially nothing about how the internet worked when I created my first website in July 1998. I had gotten my first email address in February of that year, and up until July I had not really used the internet for much more than checking my email. Then, in July, my family finally got AOL at home, and I was able to experiment and learn much more about the internet.

I quickly got interested in creating my own website and - perhaps needless to say - that first website was a disaster. Back then, pretty much every personal website was a fan site (because what else were you supposed to do with your own website?), and mine was no exception. My first attempt at a website was a Liverpool Football Club fan site. It consisted entirely of four pages of photos of my favorite players which I pilfered off other fan sites (without the owners' permission, of course). I wasn't aware of it personally, but I was the only one who could see the photos on my site. The reason? I had not yet learned the concept of uploading files. Oops. That was just one of many lessons I was to learn very soon.

Realizing I needed a kick-start, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a copy of HTML 4 for the World Wide Web: Visual Quickstart Guide by Elizabeth Castro. To this day I'm still sort of a fan of Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guides (they're great for beginners). Anyway, I tore through that book in a day and started designing. Following the disaster that was my first website, I switched to GeoCities, where I maintained a presence for the next two years. As they are now, all of my websites were hand-coded back then with Notepad and then uploaded. Graphics were created as bitmaps with MS Paint and converted to GIFs with Alchemy's GIF Construction Set. They weren't pretty, but they were functional. I spent a lot of time experimenting with frames, tables, and image maps.

I called those early GeoCities websites the Krazy RiotBoy Homepage. Admit it, everyone had retarded website names in those days. For lack of better content, the website mostly consisted of five parts. The first part was little more than my biography. The second part was my links page. So that my favorites list could be accessible from any computer with internet access, I posted all of my favorites on a links page. The third part was information about my band, Asphyxiation. The fourth part was a listing of upcoming concerts, raves, and movie schedules. And the fifth part was supposed to be a club review, but was actually mostly reviews of coffee shops, because I was not yet 21 at the time. Needless to say, nobody looked at my website but me.

I also made my first attempt at real content when I created the Krazy RiotBoy Magazine, which was intended as an online 'zine, but little ever came of it. At least it was a first attempt, what have you ever done? That's what I thought - shut up.

By late-fall 1999 I had begun work on the website that would be the true predecessor of BLUEFLOWER.ORG: Planet StarRaver.

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