Ten years on the Web - William F. Yurasko

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my Web site. Since home pages are in many ways self-indulgent media, please allow a few paragraphs…

This site debuted on the Penn State, Hazleton server as The Home Page of Maximum Power. The name was a goof; my friends and I were prone to absurd exaggeration back then. Two of them Kyle Thompson, Matt Rhone and I had been working on building sites during our freshman year of college. We worked on each for a few days to get them up. I believe my site was the first student site ever hosted on hn.psu.edu.

So, what was on The Home Page of Maximum Power? Not much. I knew I wanted a Web page, but I did not have much content for it aside from a lot of links and a few focus pages – it was really amateur. That would change with the introduction of what would become The Beltway & Yurasko.net. I posted pages about a number of interstate highways: starting with Really Get Inside the Beltway (I-495), and then followed by I-270 (Md.), I-287 (N.J.), I-295 (N.J.), I-476 (Pa.), I-895 (Md.) and primary route lists for N.J., Delaware, and D.C. I might have had something to say about a certain congressman from Altoona as well.

All but the D.C. list has been removed because I got tired of maintaining them, and people like Steve Anderson and Scott Oglesby had much more exhaustive content elsewhere.

Another highlight was my Double V campaign section of the site. It was based on a term paper I did in college about a movement that the Pittsburgh Courier embarked on to encourage blacks to support the war while pushing for civil rights. I really need to need to feature that again. I still get e-mails about that project.

In the first two or three years, I changed hosts a few times, moving first to something called lookup.com and eventually GeoCities, where THMP stayed for a few of years before my family picked up the yurasko.net domain. By 1999, I had moved everything there, and on Labor-Day weekend of that year I did a major redesign, one that would last for a number of years.

v.8

I dropped THMP in favor of WFY2K, later WFY2000. At that time I also started Weekly William News, the precursor to current William World News and essentially a blog, but done without helpful software to manage the content. I kept Weekly William News going into 2001 when I got kind of burned out on it. The site became fairly dormant for some time.

Three years later, my interest in maintaining an active Web site picked up. I finally got around to integrating Blogger into my site and in March 2004.

v.9

This time around I was not very personal, choosing instead to largely focus on articles that I would have sent to my friends via “e-mail this story”. Without any premeditation, the blog began to focus on the pursuit of a major league baseball team for the D.C. region, and we know how that went. All along I had been focusing on Penn State, especially football and whatever struck my fancy. A few months into the blog, I did a redesign, called “fresh (if jangling)” by Hardball Times, which stuck around for about a year and a half.

v.10

My latest redesign was done in December 2005. Along with a better, lighter look, it brought other, older, features of the site back to the navigation. I hope to expand on them in the near future, but I make no promises.

When I started this site, I had no idea how big of a factor it would play when I decided upon a career path, in a line of business that I did not even know existed when I started college. Funny how life works out sometimes.

So, that is ten years online a just a few paragraphs. Thanks to all the people who helped me out along the way (I hope I did not forget anyone):

Erica and my family, Brad, Fritz, Cliff, Sam, Tom, David, Muha, Steve A., Kurumi, Mr. Yamamoto and other “road geeks”, Kyle, Good Ol’ Boy, Nats bloggers, Metroblogging DC, Tortcaesar, dl004d, Eric F., Dr. Risley, Jock, DPC, the alert reader in Fairfax, Belford, Alan G., Chris G. and anyone else I forgot.