In college, my friend bought me the coolest present, a domain name and webspace, and I built Brick House with the bricks and mortar of HTML (yup, I just dated myself here). I wish I had screenshots of janetlin.com because the site was sick: animated gifs, a picture of a construction site with the message “this page is under construction”, background wallpaper of Ewan MacGregor, and oh oh a splash page that blared Outkast’s “So Fresh, So Clean”.

I had no reason to make a website about myself, certainly not like janetlin.com or janetlin.net, who have taken over my poor forsaken domain names for a career move to promote their online brand equity (although I’m sure both Janet Lin’s are very nice and sweet people) whereas I was procrastinating on my homework and posting pictures of my cat.

Back in the day, making your own website was fun, technical and creative. I would look up fansites to view their source code to learn how to do web programming. And if I got really frisky, I made my own banners and labels on photoshop.  But then came blogs, facebook, flickr, twitter, DIY sites and for some reason I never really got into them as much. They never felt like works of my own creation, just these sites that really want my data, clicks and status updates.

After my days of public service, I decided to blog again under wordpress but after a whooping 4 posts, I couldn’t handle the commitment. And then there’s twitter which totally stresses me out sometimes. So Brick House has yet to find a home but is renting at Tumblr waiting for the janetlin.com or janetlin.net foreclosure.