For almost two years I’ve been wanting to put out my personal site, but it just wouldn’t happen. Being stagnant for too long has left me with a poor sense of design (not that it was any good before) and a writing mind lacking in confidence.

I used to have my own site before, that was around summer of 1999. Back then, there wasn’t much CSS–based sites around. Or none that I know of. And there was no reason to use it. It was the time of the 4.0 browsers, when everyone designed with the infamous 1–pixel spacer gif and misused countless <TABLE> tags for their layouts. And no one complained.

The first version of my site was hosted by Xoom, the free–hosting service now long gone. And then I decided to build another site and had it hosted by Tripod. That was markku online. It was nothing special at all, just some kid’s site trying to write about whatever was interesting. The world didn’t care at all, but all I wanted was to please myself. And having my own space on the web gave me some sense of happiness, even if nobody cared.

And then one day, I got an email from someone named Karl De Leon. He saw my site and noticed many things common to both of us. He graduated a Chemical Engineer from UP–Diliman, and I was taking the same course from the same university. And we’re both from Pisay. Web design was another common interest to both of us. I discovered he owned peyups.com. I was certainly overjoyed that someone with a very famous site actually visited my page!

A few months after the 2nd Philippine Web Awards, I was invited by my friend Kevin to join Philweavers, where I realized that web design wasn’t just a western thing. Filipino designers were creating designs that had western designers looking. And soon it felt different, being in the presence of such talented individuals. You begin to feel lacking, and you pull down your site trying to do a redesign that you never finish because you got tired of the look, yet you haven’t even tried to show it to the world.

But now I end up thinking, how did I ever make my first webpage? What was my motivation? The answer was right in front of me. I just wrote it a few paragraphs ago. A personal site is your site. You build it to satisfy your desire, without much regard to the possibility that you may be the only entity looking at it. It surely would be nice to be famous like Jaemark’s Pancit Canton, but you can’t expect everyone to come rushing and praising you the day you launch your site. When you think about it, you can’t expect the same success if you aren’t even close to his high level of intelligence and gorgeousness. And makalaglag–panty amount of sex appeal. You just do your thing, and maybe the good things will come. In a few weeks, or a few months; maybe in a year. Or maybe that will never happen. Just make sure you please yourself, after all, it is your site.

Welcome to my site.