As someone who's life centers rather extensively around technology, it's painful for me to admit that I was very aware of the onset of the WWW in its current incarnation and that it still took me roughly 4 years to design and develop a Home Page. I could readily blame this on my busy lifestyle and those who know me will understand that this excuse has elements of legitimacy. Overambition fueled my procrastination. I wanted to make a stunning page -- one that many people would want to visit and tell their friends about. It would have pictures and virtual environment simulations, links to mysterious places, lots of sounds, and doors that opened the mind and imagination to fascinating ideas. People would bookmark it as a textbook case of how a home page should be designed. I wallowed in overweening hubris.
Fortunately, my grandiose, ponderous, lumbering vision was quickly shoved aside to make room for a class project that had to be implemented on the Web. Reality has a way of intruding itself quite abruptly, and, in this case, usefully on these best laid plans. My glittering HTML document visions were shoved aside for some half-done, sketchy pages with one picture, a couple links, not much atmosphere, and a couple class projects. But at least the creative barrier was broken and I finally had something to look at and build upon.
If I had learned anything through long hours of surfing, done while I was home page-less, it's that I didn't really like most of the pages that I visited. The majority of home pages, those that weren't designed to shock or amuse, or that served a very specialized segment of the Web population, were rather boring. They were like haphazard biographies at best, glorified personals on average, and tangled knots of web threads and clashing colors at worst. I could accept that these home pages were a form of self-advertisement and expression. However, it didn't take long for one page to look like the next. Finally, each visit to a new home page left as much impression on me as the half-baked promises of the advertisements that I watch on television. Some of these pages were pretty and flashy and more stunning than what I had intended but with the same unmemorable results. I simply never cared enough about the page or the people to stay for more than a couple minutes.
I began rethinking my Home Page design and it dawned on me that the metaphor of "home" still holds in cyberspace. Wherever I have visited, I've only been partially interested in the "things" that people collect. Most of the time, unless these things were extraordinarily beautiful or interesting, I could never remember what they were. Their value is usually much greater to the owner than to the observer. Colors, patterns, size, or even the value of a place caught my attention equally well. Having very little fashion sense and only a modicum of economic sense, I have a poor memory for details like color coordination, wallpaper, square footage, or cost when it comes to other people's homes. It's not that I'm not interested, it just never lingers in my mind when I think back on my visit.
I remember the comfort.
In nice places, even the messy ones, there is an ephemeral, haunting feeling of belonging. "Welcome," they say, "Please stay and make yourself at home." These places speak of friendship. It's comfortable furniture that you could fall asleep in. It's the smell of good food lingering in the kitchen. It's the sound of friendly music and laughter in the air. Maybe these places have a pretty garden or a door that's always open to welcome the next guest. Sometimes it's a spotless room where everything always sparkles and there's always a place to sit. Sometimes, it's a messy one that's cluttered with the latest hobby or reading spree but welcomes you into its hilarious madness. In all these cases, the inhabitant worked to make it a place where someone would want to visit and leave only because of the demands of modern life.
And in thinking on all the homes that I've lived in or visited, I remembered that I prefer old musty bookstores with some worn out couches because there's something of the owner's heart and soul in the shelves and the floors, as opposed to the glitzy, neon-lighted monstrosities that populate our shopping districts. In my own homes, as numerous as they have been, I've always tried to make them inviting places to be, not always with great success. Sometimes, with random roommates, the best you can hope for is a living area that won't send your friends screaming into the streets within a few minutes of their arrival.
My new vision of my Home Page is more modest. It's not the scale reproduction of the Palace at Versailles but maybe the on-line version of the home that I try to create around me. I want it to be interesting and friendly, pleasant to look at, and a nice place to discuss the world or the latest movie. It will have some quiet and tentative paint-by-numbers pictures on the walls or some good recipes bubbling in the corner. There will always be something interesting to read that might even be new. It's unfortunate that in Cyberspace, you can't offer someone a cup of coffee and expect them to be satisfied by it. But if someone finds a way to do so, you can be sure that a steaming cup will be ready for you when you visit again.
I hope you enjoy your stay. Please stop by from time to time.
