In my freshman year at Tech, every dorm room came equipped with an Ethernet connection. After a few weeks, I realized that I could run my own server from my computer. I didn't really have a reason to make a homepage at first. I just wanted to make one because it was something to do, and everyone else had one. So, I put together a simple page with sparse, jumbled HTML code and a few witty comments. The Domain opened on September 1, 1996, and I was caught in that common first stage of "Look everyone! I've got a homepage now!", basking in the joys of self-promotion and watching my server logs grow with each visitor. In the beginning, the URI! Domain had no frames, and consisted of some words of wisdom (which evolved into Potpourri and then Olio), a recommended list, a few links, and a fan club (now dead) consisting of everyone who visited. I eventually had to change that to allow people to join on their own free will.

After a few weeks, I came back to reality and realized how bad it was. First off, there was nothing there, nothing to draw people back or attract people to it. What good is a homepage unvisited? A homepage, regardless of how self-centered or self-serving, is for other people to see. If I wanted a page just for my own amusement, I could just write it in text and keep it nice and safe on my hard drive. To remedy this, I took a tour of homepages around the Net and thought to myself, "If I see a site that I like, what about it makes me want to come back?" The pages that were memorable usually had something to say, and enough content to keep me intrigued through several visits.

So, I threw everything I could into the page...music, stories, and odd thoughts, and then sat back to watch it evolve. I also tried out some nifty HTML tricks, though I soon found out that most of them just make the page uglier. Relegating the tricks to the garbage bin, I stuck with your basic text-dominant interface with a few lines and buttons. It was nifty. A few people did get spooked by the Domain's weirdness, and I even encountered one fellow who flamed me for liking llamas and providing a link to his page (It was later resolved as a misunderstanding on his part). I also wrote the first rendition of the Llama Fanfare, a quirky introductory number that played when the site first loaded up.

Now I had lots of content (well, four compositions, some short parodies, and a Llama Fanfare) but it was still a bad page. I had a hard time figuring out why people didn't like black text on a deep blue background... I thought it was very aesthetically pleasing myself. I changed the colour scheme, and went on a nicety hunt, finding little things to make the Domain a better place. Then, I bought a book and learned JavaScript back to front, just to make the Domain more user-friendly and interactive (though I took a bit of heat from the text-only Lynx users). At the beginning of 1997, the site officially became "The URI! Domain", complete with the two baby llama pictures on either side of the title page.

Around December or so, I hit the snag that every homepage owner encounters: keeping the Domain fresh and new for visitors. The novelty of having a page had worn off and I was afraid that I'd fall into the pit with some pages I'd seen, where the first page promises "Tons of Updates every Week, so please check back!" with a date of "04/02/1934" in the corner. To combat this problem, I started making little interactive bits. With things like the Everflowing Story and Fan Club, people came back because they got to add to the page, and they liked seeing their ideas in print. I also had ideas for interactive games, but they also died to lack of time or interest (see the Incomplete Projects section further down in the menu).

The Fan Club was not as arrogant a concept as it might seem. In reality, it was just a group of people who visited the site regularly. I rewarded them with secret links and an irregularly published newsletter, chock full of the zaniness that epitomized the site's attitude. I did get odd looks and snorts from people who didn't get it, but the people who joined seemed to be content with their lot.

The First Edition of the Domain was heavily visited, both by online friends and high school friends. In your freshman year, you still keep in regular contact with friends back home; it's not until the third or fourth year that you really start forgetting to write. (I am pleased to report that I haven't missed a single birthday yet, and send Happy Birthday e-mails as often as necessary). When May finally came, I was suddenly faced with the problem of where to put the Domain for the summer. Net visitors are a fickle lot, and if a site isn't around for even a couple weeks, they tend to drift off to other websites. I solved my problem by registering accounts on Geocities. The entire Domain was less than 2 MB in size, and easily fit on this server. These were the days were Geocities had no ads, and you could find a "lot number" with only three digits. I still use these old accounts off and on; I wish I had been more aggressive in registering "llamaboy" to various mail servers in 1996.

When people returned to the URI! Domain in August 1997, they were presented with a Table of Contents page showing all the sites currently hosted on my server. This list would expand and contract through the years. Now that I had almost a year of experience with my webpage, I wanted the Second Edition to be "the best site ever". Long hours were spent coding during my dead-end PEPCO internship and at the end of the summer, the Domain had a really high "wow" factor.

With this new Domain, graphics gained importance, and I learned how to incorporate frames and cookies into my design. It was still very enjoyable to scare friends by planting a personalized greeting in the page the second or third time they returned. As you can see from the screenshot below, the interface was a little bit trickier with frames, and I had to come up with the yellow back and forwards buttons at the top of the page. The Domain really suffered from feature bloat this year; anything cool or exciting that I could put on the page made an appearance. Luckily, I still had enough sense not to use animated GIFs and rainbow colours.

Many integral parts of the Domain made their debut in this year. I wrote a Jukebox in JavaScript that could take a list of MIDI files and play them in the background while you were online. The first Casino appeared here, which paved the way for the MV Trumpet Slot Machines in later years. Another new area for the Domain was the Files section. Besides the usual array of freeware and big apps that I downloaded in seconds with my vaunted T1, I also posted custom maps for games like Doom 2 and Warcraft 2. The Doom levels were quite nifty; there were twenty themed levels designed for two player deathmatch and are still available on the Games page.

I'd always wanted a chat room of some kind to appear in the Domain. You can read about my failed attempts at creating them in the Coding section. I had a very basic chat room on the Domain this year, although it was only used twice.

Some parts of the Domain were short-lived. Among those were the Secret Zone and the URI! Awards. The Secret Zone was a CGI device that took visitors to special pages if they typed in certain passwords. I ran out of fun secret ideas in a couple months; and most people couldn't guess the passwords anyhow. The URI! Awards were an attempt to get more recognition for my site on the web. At this point, there were dozens of awards like "Top 5% of the Web" and "Joe Booger's Cool Pick of the Week". I figured that if I gave out a pretentious award each week, I'd get more casual visitors to the site. The two sites which I awarded were quite pleased to get AN award, but weren't quite sure that they wanted to be associated with the lackadaisical whimsy of my site. They kept their awards quietly hidden and I canned the idea after two weeks.

Even though I save everything, I don't save everything well. As a result, I couldn't find any archived copies of the Third Edition to show off. This edition, released in August 1998, was more a change in functionality than content. Sections of the Domain were more tightly integrated, sharing designs, graphics, and navigational methods. The JavaScript code crashed less often, since I wrote it better, and since Netscape had released version 3.0 Gold.

Graphically, I spent a lot of time ensuring that images were small enough for modem download, while not appearing amateurish and silly. The entire attitude of the site became more sophisticated, and the biting, crazy humour that marked the first two editions disappeared almost completely. In fact, the only throwback to the oddball variety of the original site were the two mirrored llamas by the Domain sign, one of which appeared in all editions of the Domain through number seven.

In the Third Edition, I also released the "ME Essay", a long-winded essay on the evolution of the Domain, my biography, and some pretentious observations about life. This was the era of the Internet when every homepage creator was writing some kind of biographical essay, expecting everyone to read it and care about its contents. Now I realize that a much better approach is to just write the site normally and allow visitors to draw their own conclusions about my character and personality. Really, the whole idea of a ME Essay just sets up one more facade between me and the world that may or may not be true. The qualities that a person publically notes usually end up being more of a personality wishlist anyhow. That's not to say that many of my observations and revelations about myself weren't true; I'm just saying that you're not going to know who I am until you know me in person.

The URI! Domain was updated fairly regularly in this year, although its sister roleplaying sites closed doors one by one. I almost lost interest completely in roleplaying this year, and spent more time doing productive things in the real world. This was also the year that I did much of the work on Augmented Fourth, although the final product didn't make it out the door until 2000. In March 2000, I finally ended the URI! Fan Club. At its demise, it had 48 members.