It all started one day when I was learning HTML and created the classic "Hello World" page. After staring at it for a few seconds, I spent the next few hours playing with the tags and making the page...umm...jazzily colorful. Few days later, I learnt about web hosting and the thought having a website stuck me. I created my first site on Tripod on June 13th, 2000, and kept changing the look as I my knowledge of scripting improved. I uploaded my resume just in case a big tech company wanted to offer me a job looking at my site.Slowly, search engines attracted me and greed crept in. I wanted my site to be the first result and I did every single thing that a webmaster should not do. Strangely the greed was for the first spot and not necessarily for high traffic.
For those who are technologically inclined, I put each page in a different directory and named all of them index.html. My home page had a hidden table where the content was in the middle but the rest of the cells had blue background with blue text, the text repeating my name again and again through out so I can trick the search engines to feel that my site was most relevant for the query 'Kalpana'. I created dummy sites linking them back to my site. I signed guest books leaving my footprints like it was a sacred duty...get the picture? Very stupid tricks, most of them don't even work. This zeal fizzed out after some time and my focus slowly started shifting towards content and I started getting addicted to blogging.
By 2004, I was getting bored of how my site looked like and I wanted to revamp it from scratch. I went to the dashboard and clicked on 'delete the site'. A pop up box said "Are you sure you want to permanently delete your site?". "Yeah, I want to revamp it" I thought and I clicked the button to realize a split second later that 4 years of content was getting completely erased in front of my eyes.
A week later Google was interviewing me. My dream of a big tech company giving me a job was coming true and my interviewer did notice my web address on my resume. "You have a blog! Lets get to a computer and have a look", he said. The site loaded with one page that had half finished copy of 'About me'. "This is your blog? and you have been blogging for 4 years?" he asked. My site was supposed to give me a job in a big tech company, not spoil my chances! "I...actually...umm..." I gave up and said "yeah it needs some...err..content". I got the job but I had to save my face so I started work on my site on a war footing and had it ready in a few weeks time.
To show my solidarity towards the company I was working for, I ditched Tripod and moved to GooglePages. Bad move as back then, I had to deal with it's horrible CSS mess and finally, and very reluctantly, moved to Blogger which according to me was like a big roll of toilet paper instead of a traditional website with a nice navigation bar. Over the next few years I created a look that I like, put a navigation bar (kind of thing) and content that now makes me happy. One thing that remained constant throughout is the name of the blog 'justkalpana' and the title 'My Little World'.
10 awesome years of blogging! Thanks a million to everyone who reads it and the kind words of encouragement you have been giving me all these years.