Asymptomatic has been online for four years!
Asymptomatic, or as I lovingly call it, Asy, has been a foreground figure in my life for the past four years. It has served many purposes for me over that time.
It has served as a place for me to vent my frustration with everything going on in my life, significant and trivial. It is a place where family and friends can come together to read about what is going on with me and my family and share my perpective and theirs on the world around us.
Asymptomatic has taken shape as a result of the needs of function and the ease of form. Through Asymptomatic, PageCat was born. Twice. And its current incarnation still runs in the background of all of this today, just as it has for the past three years.
The site started out with an ugly red background and a haphazardly drawn circle-A logo. It was impossible to read. I think this was a subtext to anyone who tried to read it. It was a warning. "You are not supposed to be reading these thoughts."
In the beginning, Asymptomatic was more a catharsis for trying times. Getting through work and life wasn't an easy thing, and writing the occasional hateful poem or scathing rant really helped work all of that out without blowing up at everyone continuously.
One of the more important changes to Asymptomatic occurred when Berta got pregnant with Abby. I used a program on the web site to let friends and family vote on names. I'm proud to say that Abby was he number 1 choice for a girl, and we stuck with the results, no matter what we might have actually wanted. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it because it's cool.) Thankfully, she wasn't a boy, or you all would have been disappointed.
Since those days, Asy has been home to many things. Pictures of Abby are always going online here as she makes progress with growing up. I keep writing, which is one of the main reasons for having this website. It is a launching place of sorts for all of my other web projects, too.
I have started (and often not completed) several projects that have all gotten some web-time on Asymptomatic. RPG Wire, PageCat, Gift-List, and Less Than Slash are just a few of the more successful projects that have started here.
Asymptomatic has grown in technical ways, too. In the beginning, Asy ran on a co-hosted machine, where I rented about 20 MB of Linux space for $5/month. It came with email I didn't even use. I hand-coded each individual page in TextPad, not because I had no better program, but because hand-making the HTML and tables and crappy graphics was part of the process that made it work for me.
Today, Asymptomatic runs on a dedicated Windows 2003 server that I maintain along with a few other projects of my own, and some belonging to others to whom I provide space. The whole site is maintained with PageCat using one web page (you might think you see more than one, but trust me, it's just one 4k page), and still is updated primarily with TextPad, although now it is CSS-friendly, and uses no tables for layout.
There are 41MB of pictures online of everything: The sun setting over the desert in southern California. The first car I ever entirely owned. Atlantis in the Islands of Adventure. Holiday pictures of Berta and me dressed to kill. Giant spiders building human-sized webs over the back door of my house. Actual sword duels and jousting matches. Abby's first day on Earth, staring up at me.
Asymptomatic came to me in a dream. I woke up remembering just enough to know that the site needed to be made, and so I built it. Unlike that Kevin Costner movie, nobody came. But that's ok. Nobody was supposed to come. I reluctantly gave out the address to the site only because I found it was the easiest way to get people to the content they wanted, because I was already putting it online.
It's not that Asy was meant to be private, just that I do post private ideas here, and I tend to hyperbolize in my writing to better convey the emotions that accompany my thoughts. At the same time, I feel passionately enough about certain issues that I need to write them down sometimes. I occasionally think that I should set up a separate venue for these thoughts so that they aren't sharing the same page with cute pictures of Abby or piddance stories about what I did over the weekend.
But with all of the history I have here, why should we (Asymptomatic and I) move to make readers more comfortable? Hopefully uninitiated readers will come to learn that they are in my space, not vice-versa. Nonetheless, I have a comment system for a reason. This isn't just a pulpit - the congregation is free to speak at any time.
There are so many great things about Asymptomatic. There are so many people I've met just putting the site online. Some are close and some far away. Some of these people I've even known well in real life, or thought I did before Asy came about.
So with this posting I humbly conclude another year of Asymptomatic. Four years old. I look forward to sharing many years more of happy memories here.
