April 13th, 2011
Loveland Schools Press
#2,276
It fell in the woods
Last month, Google began detecting faint 404 signals from my first website, the online presence of an effectively fictional school newspaper. The product of many fruitful hours in Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, The Loveland Schools Press ONLINE drew a whopping ten minutes of attention from my sixth grade class, in between teacher-mandated doses of ClarisWorks and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
In 1998, a cheapskate like me couldn’t find a better host than Fuse Internet Solutions: back then, with a standard Internet subscription, you could get 10 MB of space, a free hit counter widget, and a URL that didn’t begin with some bizarre “neighborhood” name. So the choice between my ISP and GeoCities was a no-brainer.
The newspaper has since moved on and shuttered at one of those ad-supported hosts. But in a fit of self-deprecating humor, I kept its original Under Construction page online. May it serve as an example of what can go wrong at the intersection of amateur journalism and animated GIFs.