THE STORY OF HOW JIA GOT HER WEB ADDICTION! I was in love with the Internet the first time I used it at my dad's office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL. But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at home, we didn't have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o'-the-line computer in spring break '99, and of course it came with all that demo stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!! I didn't do much, I just chatted because I hadn't discovered personal homepages. It started to get old. Then a buddy online told me to go to her page at www.expage.com/page/mostcoolsite. I did. I was astonished! Concentrating on only the little Javascript trickies, I asked Kate where she *learned* all of it! So she referred me to http://www.expage.com/page/moomoooink and I went to the HTML help page. Again, I was incredulous, and I decided to make my own page. It USED to be at Expage, and, being a beginner, I was overjoyed to have Expage do all the work for me. So I slooowly built my web page, one letter after another, and then it was just stuff like polls that people actually had to e-mail me on, quirky little jokes, and basically a web page that I would hate now if I visited it. (Which I can't, because it's closed down.) At Sara's help page, again, I didn't pay attention to the content (which is AWESOME, and I still go there) and just to the little fun tricks. So when I finally was clueless and fed up with Expage's way of linking, I went to http://www.lissaexplains.com and I discovered real HTML. So I made my web page a LOT better and finally ran out of space. So I decided to move to Angelfire. Wow. When I first moved my page, I didn't copy the content, I redid EVERYTHING. I didn't even use my old Expage links. And I had to type in my HTML in from a blank space. Then I realized that I wasn't the web page master that I thought that I was. My web page and its branches all had the same color scheme. They didn't have any graphics because I didn't know how to upload. Then, I figured out how to upload, and put a couple of pictures on there. Then, someone signed my guestbook saying that I should have a different color scheme. So I changed it, a little bit, and made an entry page. Then, I followed a link to The Site Fights from someone's home page. I joined, and am still competing. Finally, I started to hate the combination of pale yellow and pink and green and light blue, and so I changed it to a starry night thing. Then I changed THAT to flowers. And then I started making graphics. This was all in the course of four months. Recently, I went back to Kate's page (www.expage.com/page/mostcoolsite) and if you go there... see for yourself... how much of an idiot I was to be wowed by that. No offense, Kate.