When the WWW first came up, the complete concept of a homepage involved a picture of the person, two lines telling you he or she studied this and that over there, and the ubiquitous collection of links. Historically, links were a good idea since there were no decent search engines available (e.g., Lycos) and finding information on the net could be a frustrating experience. A surfer was grateful for someone who was sharing interesting links on his or her page. However, the more sophisticated search engines of today have relegated links to the status of obsolescence. A person desiring specific information about virtually any topic on the web needs only to perform a search; they are rewarded with more information, faster, and more efficiently than could ever be provided through the old system of links.
Nevertheless, homepages, as a rule, haven't changed that drastically. Most people create a page for the simple reason that they can then say they have one. But really, who is interested in a page that has nothing of the person in it? If I want general information, I'll use lycos. If I look at a homepage, I expect to find some real information about the person in it.
My previous homepage was modeled in the 'old' fashion. Not surprisingly, I hated it. To be honest, it was boring, uninteresting and unimaginative. I had often considered fixing it up, yet never seemed to find the time since, in order to do it the way I wanted, I would have had to start over from scratch. Moreover, I've always hated writing about myself. Finally, in a fit of inspiration, I thought of this unique way to present Jani Jaakkima Joki to the web surfer. After only a few days of thinking on how to go about creating this new homepage , I started typing. At first, the creation process went smoothly. I already knew what I wanted to say and needed only to put the words down electronically.
However, some items were really difficult to transition into this particular style. Indeed, quite a few "extras" were depressingly impossible to use and sadly went the way of the dinosaur. Case in point: listings. Ditching my listings, however, was not nearly as traumatic a deletion (rare is the person who botherered to read a list of my RPGs) as was having to omit numerous documents, pages, et. al. that I'd chosen to distribute. Subsequently, some information was sacrificed to stay true to the concept behind this page.
In any event, I am very pleased with the results. If anything, my homepage is unique. And I've never been one for the ordinary :)
A small note about the 'Others' part. The works on it were written just for this page, as a request. The question I posed was 'What do you think of me?'. All works were submitted to me in within two weeks of the request, which was made to all parties at (approximately) the same time, and the location of the page was not revealed to the writers before they had submitted their piece, so each work should be independent of what others wrote.Thank you for all those of you who created the most unique (and best) part of this page.