In the spring of 1997 I was in a computer class at the local community college. For my final project, I posted the lyrics and story pages to my original songs online at Geocities. I think I used an early version of FrontPage, from even before it was bought by Microsoft. My girlfriend of that time was enrolled in the same class. She helped me with the layout and by creating multi-layered graphics in Photoshop for the navigation buttons.
I moved the site to a subdomain of a local internet service provider. Over the next couple years I added more pages about my boyhood pet (a beagle) and my car (a Ford Ranchero). I also posted essays I wrote for classes I took at the community college and, beginning in 1999, the local university.
In 1999 I spent some time organizing the site, cleaning up the code, and submitting the site to every search engine and awards site I thought worthwhile. My i.s.p. was swallowed up by a larger internet provider. My domain name went away, so I paid for my own domain name which I have maintained since then. In hindsight, I should have used hyphens between the words "TheBicyclingGuitarist" to make it easier for search engines to find my pages.
I spent a lot of time frequenting newsgroups dedicated to web authoring, CSS style sheets, and the like. I posted dozens of questions and got many answers from people who knew more than I did on these subjects. I still used FrontPage, but now I edited the HTML myself to remove extraneous and proprietary tags. I began paying attention to accessibility issues, and continually validated my web pages' code at online validators such as at w3.org. I submitted to a bunch more awards sites in the summer of 2002.
The winter of 2002-2003 I spent making consistent navigation for all my pages, adding a site map (a must!), and converting most of my pages to XHTML 1.0 strict, following the guidelines of Appendix C for backwards compatibility. I got rid of many layout tables and replaced them with solid CSS. The ubiquitous navigation button graphics also went bye-bye.
I sometimes receive e-mail asking about various subjects in my web site, sometimes from children doing reports on the Red Baron or Ishi, the Last Yahi. I am glad my postings have been useful to some people.
