What a long, strange trip it has been… The history of “The Wacky World of Kris Willms

It’s (almost) hard to believe that it’s been almost a decade since I began my little corner of cyberspace. (8 years, if you can believe it.) A lot of things change in that period of time. Back then, I worked for a mall-based luggage retail chain. It’s been 7 years since I left there, and it closed down 2 years ago. Then, my kids were just starting school. In six months, my oldest will be starting high school. And along with these changes, this web site has changed with the times as well.

Version 0.5: All of this started back in early 1997. We’d been with AOL for a few years, and I decided one day to take advantage of the free personal web site that all members get. Why do I call it version 0.5? Simple, it was a page, with no fancy colors or pictures, and a bunch of web links. Nothing exciting, really, but it was the beginning of what stands here today. This version only lasted a few months. The only thing that hasn’t changed was the name, which remains to this day…

Version 1.0: In the summer of ’97, my small niche in cyberspace needed room to grow. The links on the page were overwhelming. So, I put them into groups, and created a page for each theme. The original page then became the main page, and has been ever since. The first theme pages were The Sound of Silence, He Came Across in 1228…, Long Live Rock & Roll, and For the Young at Heart. I also added another page that eventually re-shape my site, The Fiction Page. This was the beginning of the move away from the old beginner’s “links-only” site, to having something to actually share with everyone. All my writing was on that page, with the exception of my fanfic, which was linked to the Forever Knight theme page. Other improvements to this version were the addition of my picture to the main page, (which is still there), music to each page, and the AOL-supplied counter & guest book. For it’s time, it was pretty spiffy.

The one thing that stands out most about this version is the wallpaper changes to the main page. I nailed right on the head the backgrounds to all the theme pages, but I just couldn’t find anything for the main page. The first wallpaper that graced this version was the psychedelic forest looking stuff. If you didn’t get to see it back then, it was really bizarre. It was up for about a month, (yes, I can’t believe I left it up so long), when I looked at it one day, and thought to myself, “What on earth were you thinking?! “ So, the next wallpaper was this blue crinkled looking stuff that was really cool, but on lo-res monitors looked weird, and was hard on the eyes, so down it came. Finally, I just went to a simple, AOL-provided background.

This version went through the usual upgrades, like new themed pages and such. It lasted almost 2 years. I still have the original source code saved on a disk somewhere amongst all my computer stuff.

Version 2.0: This is the version that stood the longest, so far. This version came about because of a big Internet decision; we were leaving AOL for MSN. Needless to say, I was not going to lose all of this work just because my dearly beloved wanted to switch providers. So I copied all the source code from my site, saved on a disk, and set up an account on GeoCities. There was just one problem, moving the site wasn’t going to be that easy. A lot of things I’d used on my site were from AOL web hosting, and the things I’d added, (like my picture), were simply uploaded through there tools that did all the hard work for you. Back then, uploading on a web host like GeoCities was an act in frustration. Fortunately, I had started studying up on HTML, and was getting pretty good at it. So, on April 1, 1999, The Wacky World of Kris Willms made it’s permanent home at this URL.

The main change of this version was the site’s focus, my creative writing. I’d always said I didn’t care if I got rich off my writing, just as long as I could share it. This gave me the opportunity to do so. So, the first big move was to divide up my writing into categories, and give them there own pages. Thus, the poetry & fanfic pages were born. Around this time, friends of mine were letting me read their work as well, and asked if I would post it on the site. I thought it was a wonderful idea, and Other’s People’s Stuff was the result of that.

With this change in focus, there really wasn’t a place for my themed link pages. Yet, I couldn’t totally abandon them. I had put a lot of effort into them. So, I created a page off of the main page, My Favorite Links, so people, if they liked, could still go to them.

With the move from AOL, the two biggest things I had on the web site that had been supplied by them needed to be completely replace; my counter & guest book. Since adding a counter with AOL was as easy as clicking a link that said “Put a counter on this page,” (or something like that), I had one on every page. When I moved my site, I realized that was a bit of overkill. Let’s face it; you only need one, that’s it. So, we have the one on the main page. As far as the guest book, I couldn’t find any I liked, so I created my own. It was A LOT of work to maintain, but it did what I wanted, so I was happy. This all worked for a while, then the glitches started setting in. A few months after the counter was in place, it reset itself to 19, and didn’t move from that number for years. Also, as if I didn’t have enough to deal with, my guest book stopped working as well, leading me to disable it.

Despite the bumps, the site ran smoothly. I even, finally, found a background I liked for the main page. With updates and maintenance, this version struck around for 6 years.

Version 3.0: This is the version that stands before you today.


Back to The Main Page