When I was first learning about HTML in late 1994/early 1995, I did the usual sort of stuff about creating my own homepage and all that and included a CV and bits about me - or at least the official me.
I was quite pleased with what was there. I think that one of the beauties of the Web and HTML is that it is relatively easy to produce and publish simple documents. However, the contents of those pages certainly didn't give very much of a flavour of who I am and what I am about. And, since they were stored on my employer's computer systems, I didn't feel that I wanted anything too outrageous to be readily available. Call me old-fashioned but I believe that there are certain proprieties to be observed.
So, I started thinking about the idea of an alternative CV - a document that would contain all the information that would potentially make me unemployable. For example, how many employers would knowingly employ
So, in September 1995, I started writing the document which ultimately became the Love and Stuff section of this project. It was originally intended to be a series of short, thumbnail sketches of a few significant incidents and people. As I continued writing, the text grew out of all proportion to the original purpose and became a major act of confession and purgation - which was exactly the sort of therapy I needed at the time.
Two things happened simultaneously. Firstly, the more I wrote, the more I remembered and the more wanted to write about the various aspects of my life. Secondly, as I explored HTML, I became aware that it was possible not only to reference other documents from within a single document but also, by using naming conventions, to reference specific sections within the same document and to reference specific sections within other documents.
In other words, as I made connections between the various strands of my life, I realised that I could replicate those connections within documents published on the Web.
So, I began to envisage a series of parallel documents which addressed a particular topic or theme in my life rather like vertical sections through strata of rock. Naturally, various people, places, incidents would be common to more than one of those documents and links could be made to each of those rather like horizontal sections through the same rock formation.
For example, when I lived in Egerton Street, I met my partner Keith who had a cat called Cyril and we went on holiday together to Berlin. Each of those four topics might be contained in four separate documents but cross-referenced.
And I realised that if you drew a diagram of the connections with vertical lines as the documents and series of other lines delineating the commonalities then the result was a web - a life seen as a web.
And I also realised that that was a image I could live with. It felt truer that the normal, linear narrative of the published, book-form autobiography.
What also excited me was the idea that I could include not only text and still photography, as in the traditional life-history, but that it was possible to include sound and video references.
The design work began during the latter months of 1995; the first Journal entry was written at the beginning of 1996. The rest is his story.
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