Monday, May 18
Homepage, sweet homepage
Whether useful or just ego-stoking, it seems as if everybody’s
got oneBy Andy ShahDaily Bruin ContributorIt’s a timeless scene:
thousands of sports fans tightly packed together, cheering in
support for their team. Then there’s that one person. That die-hard
fan, slightly intoxicated, with face painted and all, whose
boisterous shouts can be heard throughout the stadium.David
Bonilla, a UCLA sports fan, can project his shouts
worldwide.Bonilla, a first-year undeclared student, shows his
devotion to the San Francisco 49ers by maintaining an updated,
information-packed homepage about the team."I am the biggest 49er
fan and wanted to show it somehow," said Bonilla. "What better way
than to provide everything a Niner fan could want in a web
page?"Bonilla is part of a growing group of people who take to the
web for self-expression, staking their place in cyberspace by
creating and maintaining homepages.Call them ego trips, forums for
expression or information sources – homepages are a part of the
Information Age."When we hit a retro ’90s period in the future,
homepages will be seen as nostalgia, like ’70s lunchboxes," said
Clair Whitmer, executive editor of C*NET.com, an on-line computer
magazine.However, some say their function has changed over
time."The web has gone from a curiosity to a truly useful tool,"
said Dwight Silverman, computer columnist for the Houston
Chronicle. "I think folks are more interested in sites that have
something that makes their lives better."Many UCLA students have
web pages of their own. The UCLA web page directory includes 1,480
people, but some students may not be listed.Any student, faculty or
staff member with Bruin Online (BOL) is given 5 megabytes of space
to build a homepage. BOL and the Office of Academic Computing offer
homepage construction classes throughout the year.Homepages are a
new medium for people to express themselves to a worldwide
audience."(Homepages) tell you a lot about the person that made it.
They’re also fun and relaxing," said Bonilla, who also maintains
the unofficial UCLA Web Ring, a compilation of different
student-created pages.For example, some people design their sites
with flashy colors and dancing cartoon characters, while others
prefer simplicity. Like handwriting, homepages shed a little light
on who you are.Other sites on the web exist for only one reason –
money. The more hits the page gets, the more advertisers want to
market their product on it by placing ad banners on the page. One
of the most successful on-line businesses is airline ticket sales,
which eliminates the travel agent from the process.Since web pages
can be accessed from almost every corner of the world, many
employee hopefuls place their resumes on-line.Samrod Shenassa, a
third-year film and television student and graphic designer, placed
his resume on-line for convenience."It’s much easier for me to give
a prospective employer my URL than to show them my resume and
portfolio if I’m at a party or something," he said.Surfing the web,
one will see myriad homepages. But aren’t most of them unabashedly
self-indulgent?"I thought (homepages) were ego trips at first,"
said Ria Estacio, a fourth-year physiological sciences student who,
after creating a page about Sailor Moon, a Japanese animated
character, saw homepages in a different light."I realized that
people wanted to give a little something of themselves to others
through their homepages," she said. "I decided to make one myself
to let others know who I am and the things I’m interested
in.""That’s why I chose my first page to be about Sailor Moon. But
I realized that it still showed my opinion," she said.Building a
home on the web isn’t difficult nowadays. Many how-to guides are
available, and once you get the hang of HTML (the "language" of web
pages), it’s easy to start constructing.Bonilla, who learned how to
make pages in four days, said he has to update his page daily to
satisfy restless fans. He said maintaining the page isn’t
difficult, and graphics from the page are either obtained from the
web or scanned in. Estacio has another page which focuses on her
life and thoughts. It’s divided into different sections, such as
"UCLA," "Philippines," "Thoughts of a Madwoman," and
"Solitude."After learning HTML and studying other pages, she
decided to make one on her own. After all, she even saw a page
designed by a 9-year-old – that was motivation enough.Like the
telephone in its infant stages, the web has been criticized for
diminishing human interaction. Are we really a global community
when communication consists of only reading a screen and pounding
the keyboard?Keith Nichols would disagree."I met my girlfriend
through Yahoo! and we recently moved in together," said Nichols,
who writes the Webscoop column for ZDnet.com, an on-line tech
magazine. "We would never have met if it wasn’t for the
Net."However, spending too much time building a homepage is
inadvisable."In excess, the Internet and making homepages is
somewhat antisocial, like anything else taken to the extreme,"
Shenassa said.Whitmer said that when building a page, one must keep
personal information, such as phone numbers and addresses, private.
Also, she said that students who build pages should keep in mind
that a future employer may see that site – so praising socialism if
you’re going into investment banking might not be a good idea
during that job hunt.Shenassa said that homepages have evolved from
their past origins."In the early days it was rare to find a
homepage without a loud background camouflaging the cheesy blinking
text," he said. "But now more and more homepages are wonderful,
elaborate and beautiful insights into their creators."