April 27, 2009

• AllThingsMike Ten Year Anniversary

  THE DREAM BECOMES A REALITY

  AllThingsMike is the personal website of  Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool. It was established and designed in the early months of 1999, shortly after I got my very first computer hooked up to the internet. As I’ve written many times, I didn’t want to be “illiterate” when it came to being “web savvy”, and at the age of 46, I “reninvented” myself online by creating the website. A lot of visitors to this blog, WhenWordsCollide, probably never even click the banner at the top of the page, which takes you directly to the main page of AllThingsMike.

  In 1999, I had been living with my roommate Joel for four years. I was making good money at my job as an electrical systems designer and panel builder. I traveled. I was collecting books, videos, and cds. Even when I was living with my ex girlfriend Pat in the early 90s, I wanted to have a computer. This finally happened in 1997. By 1999, I didn’t want to be on the sidelines watching anymore. I wanted to be a content provider.

  AllThingsMike was created first on the Homestead service, where I keep the former main page online as a historical document. I designed the first pages on paper, believe it or not, in one of my artbooks. The sections for Poetry, Philosophy, MikeVideo, and Betty Boop existed in outline form from the very beginning. I also had sections for Movies, Travel, my Lovesearch, Komedy, and ComputerBS. As usual, I designed something that was going to take a lot of time to build, and for the first few years of the 21st century, I hopped from one section to another, building up the content. All content on AllThingsMike is totally original. I pay for the site, and have been since 2003, to insure that none of the pages contain advertisements. I’m not selling anything on my website. At my age, I just wanted a “place” where I could “store” my “art” and “literature” so that people could read my words and look at my assorted “art projects.”

  The blog was created as the “updates” section to the website, and was first hosted by blogspot.when the blog first went online in December of 2002. HERE is a link to my very first blogpage. I even used the title “WhenWordsCollide” on an early blogspot blog, which can be accessed HERE.  I liked blogging on Xanga because of the comments feature, and I slowly built a “readership”. However, as the years passed, I began to concentrate more on the blog than the website. Now, utilizing the “tags” feature on my blog, I have created pages of themed entries which I link to from pages on my site.

      

  NAVIGATION THROUGH 1000 PAGES

  When visiting AllThingsMike‘s main page now, visitors find a list of each “project” with the requisite links in the main column on the left, beginning with the most recent. Currently, there are 14 projects and site updates listed. I keep a lot of old “updates” chronologically on the 2nd Index page. The navigation clouds on the right lead to my “sister sites” and main sections. The very first link on the Navbar is to WhenWordsCollide, this very blog. I try to make it easy to toggle from the blog to the website, so the site link is at the top of the blog.

  Besides the Navbar, in which individual clouds contain the links, there is also a drop down list of links. At the top of the page are links the various autobiographical materials I am posting serially. The most complete versions of my Autobiography , and My Sexual History are linked from there. There is also a link to the “History” essay.  I did an update to the main page just yesterday, even though I haven’t done much online in the early months of 2009 because of my move and resettling. In November of 2008, I began to update each of the sections to my site, in preparation for a 10 year anniversary celebration. Although the move got in the way of a lot I wanted to and didn’t accomplish, the actual date of the anniversary is the date of my 56th birthday, May 1st, which arrives this Friday.

  I don’t know whether there are actually 1000 pages in my website. I never counted them all up. But there are many many pages. Consider this. ElectricPoetry, where I’m meticulously posting each of my poems, collects each year’s poetry on a single page. Each title on the page is a link to the poem on a separate page. MikeVideo, where I tell my history of videomaking, was completely redesigned last year to add year pages, from which the year’s work can be accessed. Besides the sections and the larger websites, there are also links to my Webshots Gallery, where I store my photos, and The MikeVideo YouTube Channel, where a lot of my videos are showcased.

  The Cultural Blender is a website dedicated to pop culture. Sometimes I create “websites in a weekend”, themed around a particular subject in which I’m interested, like 2005′s “Robots”, or 2006′s “Clowns”.

  AN ELECTRONIC EXPERIMENT IN ART

  Although some of the sections designed for AllThingsMike never really bore the fruit of my early labors, what does exist is pretty impressive, even for a ten year anniversary. I wanted to write movie reviews, since I’m a great movie buff, but found out pretty early that it takes quite a while to write reviews, and I’d rather spend the time watching more movies. Sites like the Internet Movie Database and Netflix offer their members the ability to post movie reviews, and my review section is still online, but for the most part, the ElectricMovies section of AllThingsMike pretty much died in 2003. There are many “failed” sites and sections of AllThingsMike. “Virtual Pantherama” was an early (2001) attempt to create an online High School Yearbook for alumni. The ElectricPoetry Group on Yahoo was a pretty popular writer’s group for two years, but fizzled out due to inactivity. The Lovesearch documents my failed internet search for romance.  The Komedy Komedy Komedy section was to be a virtual Mad Magazine of content, including a parody news website called “Hearsay.com”. ComputerBS, which does contain my “short history of the web” essay, isn’t an active site, but I occasionally write themed discourses for the blog. Most recently, in the form of the “GeekSpeaking” column.

  SUCCESSES

  I’m always whining about how I wanted to become an internet “brand name”, with some of my projects going viral. This never happened, but I am proud of a lot of my accomplishments during the last 10 years.

  The Betty Boop Pages website is always popular. Fans of Betty Boop flock to the site and to my collections of photos of the collectibles in my house, decked out as “The Betty Boop Museum”. The art showcased on the Betty Boop Pages site are computer composites I created in Micrografx Picture Publisher using my figurines and photography.

  My photography, featured in my Webshots Galleries, always gets lots of hits. I post most of my photos under the Travel/California tag, and I’m currently #9 of over 14,500 photographers who post to that tag.

  The Philosophy section of the old site became the “Universal Blog” in 2003. I haven’t posted anything on the blog since mid 2007, but this is where you can find most of my spiritual and religious themed writing collected. I subtitle AllThingsMike “from the personal to the universal”. Not only do I post material which I personally create, I write about our place as humans in the Universal scheme of things.

  THE NEXT DECADE

  Who knows what will be arriving on the pages of AllThingsMike during the next decade. I’ve always wished for more interaction, message boards, comments sections, and a more fulfilling multimedia experience. Sadly, I still am using a 7 year old version of Dreamweaver to construct my pages. A lot of my website looks absolutely prehistoric, but I always wanted a graphics laden site, and the graphics still tend to crash the browsers of a lot of older computers. The pages take a long time to load, but once loaded, I think they are among some of the most beautiful pages on the internet. It has always been my dream that my personal website would be my legacy, the place where all my “art and literature” would be stored for eternity.

  This won’t happen, of course. As soon as I stop paying for the site’s maintenance, it will shut down. But I’m still here, so the site is still here. Check it out. AllThingsMike. Ten years old on Friday, a birthday shared with yours truly.

  • 11:19 am
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