> “Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994.
> So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer.
> As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.”
> He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page.
> So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB.
Olia Lialina, net artist who does a lot of internet history stuff: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5118
Wrote about homepages recently. https://maya.land/monologues/2022/09/19/homepages.html I hope people have fun with this tool! Even without getting your hands dirty yourself with some HTML, it encourages an attitude of "I ought to be able to make this be how I want" towards technology