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About This Site
JaredWSmith.com has gone through more incarnations than I know what to do with. When I got started making Web pages, though, having a truly personal site was the furthest thing from my mind.
1999-2004 (The Realm Era)
The Early Days
The need for a personal site arose during a trip to San Diego when friends of my late aunt Sobeida wondered why I had a great Windows-related Web page up (the former windowslaunchpad.com), but it had very little about me up there. Others echoed these sentiments, so I got to thinking.
One afternoon shortly after returning from San Diego, I fired up my then-favorite song, You, Me, and World War III (Big Single Remix) by Gavin Friday, fired up Paint Shop Pro 3.0, and came up with a doozy of a graphic.
I stuck that graphic on a simple page with a black background on realm.htmlplanet.com. (Freeservers added lots of advertising, too.) It sat for about three months, floating on the Internet (there was only one at the time) with nothing to do.
Realm 1.0: The Super-Animated Hyperactive “Right Now” Edition
The Realm, Version 1.0. Best experienced in IE, so you can get the crazy animations, hyperactive version of “Right Now” in MIDI format, etc…
Sometime in October the family managed to snag a copy of Office 2000 Premium. In it, of course, was the full version of FrontPage 2000. To a young, budding computer geek who wanted instant gratification and actually was naive enough to think a “Designed in FrontPage” badge was prestigious, this was the Holy Grail. I dove in and immediately started putting together this…erm…masterpiece. Frames? Check. Annoying hyper-fast MIDI rendition of “Right Now” by Van Halen? Check. DHTML effects that would induce sea-sickness? Check. Realm 1 had it all…including Tahoma. I was obsessed with Tahoma at this period in my life, going so far to make a parody of a Britney Spears fan site that instead professed love for Tahoma. (Sadly, Tahoma Infatuation appears to be no more on its original address. I’ll seek out a copy somewhere.)
The Realm promised to be the mother of all personal sites. It went above and beyond the call of duty; not only was the obligatory bio present, I posted song and website parodies as well. By far, though, the most unique feature was the blow-by-blow detail of my failed attempts at dating known as The Girl Front. This would persist through three versions.
Realm 1.0 was notable for not having any graphics. This was a point of criticism — yes, it was completely visually un-pleasing. After installing Corel Draw 7, I also found that Corel Photo-Paint 7 was included. It was SOMETHING. And in my experimentation with Photo-Paint, I discovered that Franklin Gothic was “The Microsoft Font” (at the time, it was the font used in all their product branding). Because of my sick love for everything Microsoft at that time, I knew The Realm had to incorporate that font.
Within weeks, I would do up a whole new look for The Realm — Microsoft Font and all — that would completely usurp this initial version.