I cannot believe that it’s been five years. Five years ago on March 23, it was a Saturday afternoon, and I put together Ben Schumin’s Home on the Internet, the original version of The Schumin Web. You can see what this original site looked like in the Archives. Compared with today’s site, it was pretty primitive. No subsidiary sites back then, no Web Cam, no Archives, no College Life, and no writings. In fact, my official picture back then was this one on the left. You can tell… except for the glasses, I haven’t changed a bit. Still, you have to wonder… what would high school have been like if I had not had the Web site? I started the site in my freshman year of high school. Now I’m a college sophomore. More amazing is that my site first originated from America Online. The first six months of my site’s existence was off of America Online’s servers. And now I am one of those people who wouldn’t touch AOL’s online service (Instant Messenger is lovely, though) with a ten foot pole. In fact, I have found many good alternative uses for America Online CDs. Since the program on the disc isn’t worth the plastic it’s printed on, the CDs make excellent frisbees, coasters, sun visors, individual fans, hand paddles for swimming, as well as necklaces for middle-schoolers who find that hanging anything unusual around their necks is “cool”. Since then, my site has been on RICA.net’s system, as well as what used to be SimpleNet (now Yahoo! Website Services). Still, it’s been five years now, and look how far we’ve gotten in design and content. I can’t even begin to imagine what the next five years will hold.
