Blast from the Past

I found my first blog, which led to the second. The layout was hand-drawn on middle school math exam scratch paper and made using a cracked copy of Photoshop 8. They're hosted on...imagebucket or something similar? All gone now, but the texts and posts are still there almost two decades later. With all the links to the bloggers in my year, all of them looking wildly different. To know how to style your pages was cool. I remember learning HTML by checking the page sources of all the cool websites I landed on. I ended up taking the base structure from my favorite fansite, fudging with the tables and replacing all the image buttons for hours after school. Tables! It seemed so easy then, so transparent, as long as the website didn't use Flash. Near the end of middle school I was introduced to CSS and XML, but they made little sense to me compared to the naked straightforwardness of raw HTML even if nested tables drove you crazy every single time. Despite not understanding half of the…