A Journey Back to The ...

My first website which I painstakingly designed from scratch was hosted at Geocities. That was way back in '97. I bought PaintShop Pro 5, brushed up on my html and came up with something decent. At that time, Javascript image rollovers were all the rage. And so were black backgrounds. But I'm so over them now, phew! You guys should be so grateful

The intention of having a website was to document the testimonies and thoughts - both personal and from friends - that it may encourage weary net surfers. At that time, blogging (and with it, commenting features, yada, yada, yada) was still at its infancy. People (or maybe it was just me) were a bit skeptical about the thought of having an online diary. Who would dare to bare their raw emotions for all and sundry to see? And I was curious about who would actually want to read diaries of people they don't know. Doesn't that make one a voyeur of some kind? Well, as we all know, blogs are the in-thing now. Which I guess makes us all voyeurs lor.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. The absence of the commenting feature was not really felt. Not when guestbooks were around. Yeah baby, back then guestbooks rock! Made quite a lot of friends through the Bravenet guestbook I installed on my site. I was deeply encouraged when people actually took the trouble to tell me how much those testimonies touched them and made a difference in their lives somehow.

A lady who share the same English name I used then. Another lady whose daughter who passed away in a tragic accident having the same name as I did. A guy who was suicidal and could relate to an article about thoughts on suicide that I wrote. A boy who connected with me through the web because he was at the end of his tethers - and whom me and my big bro helped to kick off his association with the wrong crowd.

It just goes to show, how many hurting people are out there. And how many nice people who would actually stop by, say hi for a season and a reason. Some I've never heard of from again. Some even thanked me for my friendship and concern but decided to give up on God. Some to give me hope when I most needed it. Amazing what a humble website can do.

I stopped maintaining the website when I moved to a place without phone lines for a year. Somehow I never did touch the site after that. Geocities pulled the plug after a while and deleted all my html files and pics. Aiyo, why didn't I make a backup of my precioussss??

Maybe it is wired in me somehow - the need to write and share the goodness of God that I see around me. Just cannot keep silent about it. Plus I wanted to be more disciplined in my writing. The best way to go about it is to write regularly to people who are willing to read whatever that you spew from the depths of your mind - shallow or otherwise.

So circa 2002, I decided to start another website. This time, I shall try my hand at blogging. Everyone's doing it and it seemed fun. Tried blogspot for a while but in the end, I wanted more freedom and control to do and experiment with more fancy stuff and other web publishing software. And I wouldn't want what happened with Geocities to happen to my writings again. Ever. It's like losing your babies or something.

That led to finally getting my own domain name and webspace. Had lots of fun (and trouble!) choosing the perfect domain name. I wanted it to be anonymous somehow, wouldn't want my boss to type www.coolcatsname.com and read my personal musings. Wanted something with cat in it but couldn't get hold of www.catplanet.com. At long last, I chose www.coolcatalyst.com because coolcatalyst means being an agent of change. I love the meaning of the word. And recently, I realised that hey, I can also slash it to just coolcat - so there's still the cat word in my domain name.

It also took me a long while to settle for a reliable webhost. They've been giving me great service thus far - thanks Flexihostings!

Ok, now that I've gone through all the trouble of getting the domain name, webspace and setting up my very first content management system, I thought to myself, "What the heck do I write now?"

It's one thing to write web articles once a month. It's quite another to blog on an almost daily basis. What on earth do I have to say? I checked out some blogs and felt comforted to note that people are very lax with what they blog. Anything also can. Even one-liners can generate loads of comments.

And thus, I started blogging - mostly privatised journals meant for my eyes alone - and then later, on Oct 2003 to blog publicly. The best thing about blogging on a daily basis is that it allowed me to talk about trivialities and to just hang loose. It was liberating.

It has been an interesting journey thus far and I still feel that there's so much more room for me to grow. For all the massive improvements showcased on my present site (css, white background and NO Javascript image rollovers), I feel that I've fallen short of what my humbler website managed to accomplish so long ago.

Ah well, the journey continues... And the road goes ever on.