The teenage girl’s internet of the early 2000s

Cliques, webrings, and blinkies

I started this “business” when I was a teenager. I had zero clients haha.

Recently I revamped my personal website, which was hard, because I’m a web developer by trade, not a web designer. Last time I did it was as a teenager making websites for fun in the early 2000s. I thought I might try to reuse some of that, as some of the trends back then (pixel art! Monospace fonts!) are now trendy again. But I found myself lost on Web Archive for hours, remembering how the internet used to be.

They say the internet never forgets, but only fragments of my first website remain there. But it’s enough to trace my path, from just fooling around by adding a cute background to my page to writing my first line of Javascript (honestly…it was to cheat at Neopets). It’s kind of surreal because that entire subculture of hobby web development I was part of back then was entirely teenage girls. It’s like boys didn’t even exist except to sometimes blog about or post about on the BBS. The big things were:

Join so I can add you to our <table>

Webrings: Webrings were big across the internet back then, but especially among my friends and I. We had our first webring on the now defunct Expages, which was a site where anyone could make a page. We called…