A second go-round

This blog represents my attempt to re-romance the web.

Ten years ago, or thereabouts, I spent a lot of time creating websites. It started with a website for the Ithaca College swim team (I'm a 2000 IC alum), which probably provided a little too much information on some of our team's extracurricular activities. The college and sports information weren't savvy enough to notice that there were pictures of athletes drinking beer on a quasi-official team site (I will attribute my indiscretion to the fact that I was a 20 year-old college boy lacking anything that resembled good judgment). That was 1998... a different time, indeed.

I was convinced I could make a living as a web-designer in the summer of 1999. That was the peak of the internet bubble. By the time I graduated in Spring of 2000, the jobs were sparse and only being given to designers with five years of experience or more... not to any college grad with a heartbeat. That was a let-down. I found a temp job in the Philly suburbs instead of a job in SoHo.

In 2001, I made a half-hearted attempt to make money in web-design. This included doing some free-lance work for a friend's mother's non-profit. It was a decent website, had all the basics. But things started getting more difficult, I had to learn new hosting systems that were more complicated than the IC servers. If you wanted to provide a space for user feedback, that involved learning .asp code, or maybe .php code, and I lost interest. The web evolved quickly. I couldn't hack it part-time.

Anyway, cut to 2011. I'm in my early thirties, a decade later, and the web has experienced a few great "shake-outs." The heavy-hitters have been established. The expectation of a web-presence for future faculty is clear. So this is my second foray into the web.

As for the title, "SpartanSpartan." The first "Spartan" is the word in its adjective form: "simple; showing an indifference to luxury," which characterizes my general belief about life. The second "Spartan," in its noun form (or mascot form), refers to my current status at Michigan State U (mascot=Spartans)... also was my high school mascot... so it seems to have some relevance to me.