Hello, and welcome to:


Hey there, websurfer! Get comfortable and let the soothing nostalgia of an amateur, '90s style website wash over your eyes!

To make you feel more at home, enjoy this fireplace and some fun gif buddies!

So, in essence, this is my little slice of the web in the form of an e-portfolio, curated for the FSU English department's summer training program for incoming graduate students (aka "Boot Camp"). The aesthetic is inspired by the now defunct Geocities websites that populated the internet in the '90s and early 2000s (shutdown by Yahoo in 2009). As a Wired article by Matthew Shechmeister states, there were over 38 million webpages created through Geocities which helped "make the web a more vibrant territory."

The host of this very website, Neocities (an obvious play on Geocities), wishes to "revive the support of 'creativity and free expression' provided by GeoCities before its partial shutdown." One class during FSU's bootcamp focused on the concept of social media and other creative online content moving toward a more pre-configured layout in which people put together content within more strict confines or parameters (think Facebook or Twitter or the more touchscreen swipeable, smoother, and cooler website host/creators like Wix or Weebly).

It is interesting to view these endeavors through the lens of genre, collaboration, and multimodalism: some other major areas of focus during the FSU summer courses. Much of the code of this website was borrowed from other sources. The use of parallel gifs, under construction signs, blocks of text, all fit within the genre of a user created website during the Geocities era which was known to be "brimming with blinking, moving, garishly colored text and animated dancing cats" (Farhad Manjoo in a Slate article). All that being said, once you click away from this page (with few exceptions) I have decided to make the layout cleaner for readability (though still in the style of this genre of webpage...just less exaggerated).

Recent Updates: Nothing for now.

Proud to be part of the


asp hit counter
asp hit counter
     

  
All text and site design © Shaw Patton, 2017
July 2017