HTML (how to make lovely)

"You learn HTML yourself."

Before Myspace was even cool, Neopets was the place to be. And as a kid ranging from ten to twelve years old (I can't remember how old I was when I first joined) Neopets provided a range of opportunities far beyond the simple notion of having an internet creature for a pet. (For the record, Tuskaninnies are my bitch.) I'd barely grasped the notion of the internet yet soon I discovered what HTML really was.

If you wanted a customised shop front, or profile, or message board signature you had to put a code in. It was a weird code, one terribly full of <'s and >'s and /'s and American spelling of "color" and ='s. But if you wanted to look pretty on the Internet, HTML was as good a friend to you as any makeup artist. (For the record #2: Bad analogy.)

It became all too apparent, the endless websites devoted to Neopets Shop Layouts and Neopets Profile Layouts, pages and pages of Neopet HTML buffs creating preset layouts that all you had to do was copy and paste and these lovely people would write "PUT YOUR SHOP DESCRIPTION HERE". It was too easy. Copy, paste, edit, post, edit out the person's credit link so it looked like you made the page. Yes, even as an eleven year old I was a stingy credit taker.

Thing was, I had a hard time finding a layout I liked. People were too crass with colours, and I was an arty elitist eleven year old who thought she knew best. So I decoded the HTML, and, thanks to my computer literate father, began to understand with the aid of a book called HTML For Bitches or something along those lines. Just kidding, the book never had that title.

#000000 meant black and #ffffff meant white and the background colour (or should I say 'color') code became my best friend. I never made my own layouts from scratch, just took a template and did the fine tuning.

And several years later, studying the very subject as part of a degree with eye on a career, I'm doing the same thing. I find myself on Blogger trawling through the endless CSS and experiementing and trialling and erroring, rusty from the year of HSC did to me, limiting my internet and in turn ruining my prodigous scabbing skills in the process.

But it makes me wonder - how many people build it from scratch? Obviously someone has to (or maybe they don't, with the aid of programs that do it for you nowadays) so that internet stinges such as myself can fiddle and tweak and continue to stinge. Since Neopets I have been on a number of sites where building your own profile is recommended (if you want to leave the derelict status of n00b forever), whether it was Myspace (lolwtf?) or a site called Mibba. Unfortunately Facebook forces uniformity upon us. (unless you play FarmVille, then you'll always be a n00b.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that websites are trying to make us do these things, and there'll always be other people who'll make layouts over and over and post them up on a website so we can copy them. I wonder if they realise how their work can be used as a starting point for more HTML/CSS savy users? Who knows. HTML is the recipe for your internet presence - a recipe on how to make lovely.

As I delved into the dark memories of my past for this blog I went back, just out of curiosity, to Neopets...

... they've sold out, man.