Here's the never-before-seen embryonic ancestor of this site, which never got posted online. Obviously I had no idea what I was doing back then. Note that my original idea was to name the site "Lard Biscuit Enterprises," to which I returned for the 2006 revision. The "lardrule.gif" divider lines were the sole design element that was used all the way through the 2004 site, my beloved Palatino Bold font notwithstanding.

The first real home page featured the abortive section "Forces of Evil," where I had planned to spew venom about all the things that piss me off. I never got into the muckraking thing and it soon went away. I was going for a minimalist feel, all rectangles and black on white with splashes of color. Nothing brilliant, but it was pretty different from all the flashy, gaudy stuff happening on the web.

By this time I was starting to get all fancy myself with JavaScript rollovers in the navigation. The alignment and spacing of the masthead and lardrule have become much more balanced. My other site devoted to The Anna Nicole Show was eating up most of my time during this period. Check out the nostrils on that guy!

Now I really shook things up with a "mosaic of lard" composed of 99 of my trademark 40x40 thumbnail graphics arranged into a sort of periodic table of my brain. I liked the idea of a busy graphical pattern that looked nothing like a navigation system until you rolled over it. I was trying to ease user access to the most popular features of my site, such as my Star Wars and Annanicology content.

Caving under pressure from the blogosphere, I placed text material directly on the home page for the first time. I sort of miss my old home page style based around non-verbal graphics instead of jibber jabber, but at the same time I began to feel it was too pretentious to make a big showy deal about your home page navigation without going ahead and telling the folks something. Now the stark white pages are history, but I think my current home page is a lot less cramped and gives the text room to breathe.