Sponsor's Message

Hours and hours of fun and frivolity could be had by trawling the web for examples of good and bad homepages, covering all manner of topics and written by a wide variety of personality types.

These days however, the personal homepage is becoming something of an endangered species and perhaps the closest thing we've got is the ever-growing list of blogs that have begun to appear.

I'm not a great fan of blogs however, at least not most of the ones I've seen recently. Of course it could be said that this column is a form of blog and, if so, it's probably one of the Net's oldest so I guess I shouldn't be too harsh.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

I know that there are some really good blogs and a lot of people who love them, which is great because good content in any form is always nice to find.

But I miss the crudely crafted genuinely unique homepages of a decade ago.

Where are all the ugly colours, mish-mash of typefaces and sizes, atrocious layout and badly formed HTML (don't say "right here" please :-).

I wonder how many people use the free webspace that many ISPs still offer as part of a monthly subscription -- far too few I suspect.

Why don't people take advantage of this wonderful resource?

The existence of heaps of quite useful WYSIWYG webpage design tools means that you don't have to be a techy-type to do this and I'm pretty sure that everyone has something they'd like to share with the world -- even if it's only the snaps from their last holiday.

Maybe it's time to try and rekindle people's enthusiasm to put their personal mark on the web. Of course a comprehensive index focused on listing all those personal homepages in some sort of order would perhaps be a very useful contribution to this goal. Perhaps there already is one?

Have you spied any good personal homepages recently? If so, why not share them with the rest of us. Also feel free to share the worst ones you've stumbled across -- after all, it is Friday.

Lighten Up
Now I know most of you consider Bill Gates to be a frumpy middle-aged geek with about as much sex-appeal as a discarded banana peel but it would appear that someone once thought he had potential as a male model.

Yes, check out Bill's sultry poses for Teen Beat back in 1983. Oh the humanity!

Here's an amazing invention that, the inventor claims, allows you to see through solid walls. It's a shame nobody told him about good old windows (the glass ones, not the software ones).

Keep those links coming folks!

Aardvark Forums
The forums are back up at: www.aardvarkforums.co.nz/forums, have your say on today's column

Unfortunately you'll have to re-register because we're starting the new year with a complete reinstall.

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