The rise and fall of Slowpoke's Pokémon Page

Seven years ago today, I opened my first web site to the public. It was a Pokémon fan site called Slowpoke's Pokémon Page. Yes, when we were in fourth and fifth grade, that was the big thing, and the Internet was new and exciting. The most logical way to combine Pokémon and the Internet was to start a fan site with news, games, pictures, and who knows what else, and then promote it any way you possibly could -- by giving people awards, trading links, and joining top site lists. Often the webmaster would refer to himself or herself as a particular Pokémon, and Slowpoke was my favorite, so I went with that.

The first thing I needed was a place to host my site. It wasn't long before I looked to the free hosts that were flourishing thanks to pop-up ads. I had GeoCities in mind because it was very popular at the time, but being the dumb 9-year-old I was, I couldn't navigate through the site enough to create an account. Well, my dad couldn't either. We ended up sending them an e-mail saying something to the effect of "Dear GeoCities, We would like to make a web site with your service. How do we do this?" Then my friend Casey recommended Angelfire, which I ended up sticking to.

As for HTML itself, my first HTML tutorial came from -- you guessed it -- a Pokémon fan site. I learned all the things you needed to know: making links, setting the background image, changing the font color, and even making links out of images. I'd venture to suppose that Pokémon inspired a generation to learn HTML and start making web sites. It was really as simple as that; I caught on to HTML rather quickly, as I recall. One day I made up a draft of the main page ("Slowpoke's Pokémon Home Page"), and it wasn't long before I knew enough HTML to realize my design.

After a couple of days of working on the page, it was ready to go public, and on July 24, 1999, I started promoting SPP. It grew quickly as I added more and more pages. Eventually Casey joined as a co-webmaster to provide the latest Pokémon news. And thanks to my aggressive promotion, the site became more popular than I could have imagined. I even got a domain name. The site really wasn't that popular now that I think about it, but I felt that it was back then, and I guess that's all that counts.

But, after a while, other interests pulled me away from my site and Pokémon in general, and by the end of 2000, I had stopped updating SPP. Later I would go on to work on other web pages, including (but not limited to) flipacoin.net and The Dvorak Keyboard and You. I also made a side project out of compiling the list of characters that would eventually become Ultimate Cool Characters. But it bothered me that whenever somebody asked for my URL, I couldn't just give them one address. I needed to keep everything together. And that's how, in 2003, The World of Stuff was born. The rest, as they say, blah blah blah.

Of course, SPP's legacy remains. I used ZZN to create an e-mail service called SPP Mail. I started using it in 2000, and I still have the same address to this very day. That explains my e-mail address, if you were ever wondering about it. And how could I forget my old host? The World of Stuff itself was hosted on Angelfire in its earliest days. And, well, I think that's about it. Maybe there isn't as much of a legacy as I thought... except, of course, that all this wouldn't be here if I hadn't become obsessed with Pokémon in the fourth grade.

Blog in Space: "When telling the world simply isn't enough." Yes, you can have the content of your blog beamed into space. Supposedly.

First we had captchas that required users to retype some partially obscured letters to prove that they were human. A few newer captchas have taken it further by presenting (for example) a bunch of pictures of waterfowl and requiring the user to select the goose. The hotcaptcha is in a similar vein. It presents nine guys or girls from Hot or Not, and you have to select three good-looking ones. Best (or worst) of all, you can even use it on your own site.

One year ago: "The odds of you being killed this year are 1 in 1,755."
Two years ago: "I can almost hear you cringing, but sometimes you have to stick to what works."