wide open french doors lead toward a glass-roofed courtyard, flooded with greenery and preened flora spilling over into the walkways. above, the sun is somehow perfectly placed in the sky to have beams of sunlight shining through stalks of green. in front of each plant lining the walkway, a photo and brief description on cardstock sticks out of the soil.

geocities (1998)

my first experience with web design—since code felt daunting—was on geocities, which when i finally encountered it, had drag-and-drop functionality to create webpages. my main motivation behind having a geocities site was to participate in the vikimouse digital dollhouse community, but instead of dolls, it was little digital houses for mice using image maps. one of my fondest memories was exploring folks' vikimouse houses, that were often alongside small fictional stories made up about the mice families—wholesome.

msn groups

i'm not sure how long it existed before i fell into it, but there was a brief moment in my digital tenure where i was part of a text medieval fantasy roleplay, but the roleplayers used msn groups. this kicked off the idea of starting my own roleplay began, even if it was really only static webpages with links.

expage.com (1999-2002)

i first found expage on the path to create my own link-based text "game." expage was a quick host with limited HTML functionality, and all you got was one page per URL. each page you created would be at expage.com/%pagename%. i started work on a horse "game," where depending on which links you clicked, took you down different paths of roleplay. eventually, though, i stumbled upon the personal web side of expage, which would change my life forever.

at the height of me learning about the internet, one thing stuck in my mind very clearly: do not reveal any personal information about you. while i was happy to share intimate details about my life, i was smart to change my name. this part of my life, i referred to myself as rebeccca/becca (listing myself often as beccerz) to help shield my online life from my real life.

my first expage, though the URL has been lost to time, was themed around lemonade. the site was called lemonade odyssey. it was there i somehow inserted myself into the cliques that were fostered there, groups of girls coding and gossiping in AIM chats. i somehow bounced around from envy.nu/beccerz and expage around this time.

at some point, i migrated to /c0cac0la, another beverage theme.

angelfire (2001)

i had a brief foray into angelfire where i had a hate site, inspired by a britney spears hate site, which is shockingly still up. still looking for remnants of that.

mint-chill.net (2002)

my first domain at age 11 had very little substance outside of being a host for people to host their sites on and a rudimentary blog (talking about only things 11-year-olds would talk about). during this time, my layouts featured a giant image and small text that was laid over the image. unfortunately, most of the images have been lost to time.

lose-yourself.org (2002-2004)

named after the eminem song for some god-awful reason, it started as a group blog between me and my two best friends, stefanie and emily (who, at the time, went by "tori"). this domain was the longest-held that i had; surprisingly, based on the name.

joygasm.org (2004-2005)

i wanted to continue the group blog concept, so we moved forward with moving that aspect to a different domain, joygasm.org. this was soon abandoned in lieu of just a personal site once i finally left l-y.org.

myspace (2006)

my myspace is a serious blast from the past. not only was i coming into my own as a teenager, i had recently been pulled out of public school due to bullying. there was a lot of self-expression as a young queer person as i was learning to come into my own as a 15-year-old, lying about my age that i was two years older.

the quilting bee v1 (2006)

the first time i joined the quilting bee in 2006, i was bee #193. unfortunately, a lot of my pixels are lost to time. if you have any of my patches, please let me know. this community was so awesome to me, and i loved being part of it.

miss-behaved.net (2006-2007)

m-b.net was my little oasis with pixel art. i was beginning to feel more confident about what i could post, and things became much less depressing to read. unfortunately, a lot is lost to time.

ihtp.org/makeshift (2007)

emily hosted me on ihavetopee.org/makeshift after i stopped paying for m-b.net. i liked the lack of responsibility after hosting people for six years, but i transitioned to the more "grown-up" blog format for this website.

quilting bee v2 (2007)

the second time i joined the quilting bee, i was bee #41. i'm very grateful for the quilting bee being archived, as it's how i was able to kind of piece together my past.

alex.crimsonietta.net (2008)

while preparing to go to college, i spent my senior year in a cms at alex.crimsonietta.net. i tried to have a self-hosted blog outside of the livejournal ecosystem, and i seemed to keep up with it for a bit of time. this was my last personal site that i remember before i completely transitioned to a professional portfolio when i went into college.