When I was growing up in the 90s, if you wanted it to look cool, hell, maybe even if you wanted to be cool, you had a xanga, and then a live journal, and then a myspace. Somewhere around the time I was understanding my gender and sexuality in the deep dark recesses of AOL chat servers I was also unburdening my soul into a moody diatribe on live journal. But I was also learning how to code.
I didn't think about it at the time, but a whole generation taught itself to code in pursuit of aesthetic expression. There were no themes back then. If you wanted your site to look different, to look like you (or whatever your preteen self thought that might be at the time) you had to figure out how to do that yourself.
I remember finding little javascript code snippets that would make sparkles rain from the sky behind a foreground of slightly wavy text. After coming to the terms with that appalling and heavy handed monstrosity (I mean come on, the 80s were over), I think I settled on some blood red and black. Once a dame in red I suppose...
I was just talking about this with my partner over tea and discovered she'd done the same thing, and that over the years she's used the basic education it gave her in HTML and CSS in all sorts of odd places. At the beginning of our lives, we were given a clear message - the spaces on the internet are malleable.
What message are we giving kids these days? The spaces on the internet are so gigantic that they'll swallow your identity whole unless you can be shiny, flashy, and catchy enough to capture the collective attention enough to go viral?
I miss the sparkles...