The Internet Archive is a glorious thing. Using their Wayback Machine, I am able to go as far as back as possible in Web history and visit the sites that I first encountered so many years ago. Being in only seventh grade I was still a devotee to all things “Star Wars” and TheForce.Net was the place to be, along with the official site for my favorite movie magazine at the time, Cinescape. There were many other sites I followed, mostly film-related, but CHUD.com turned out to be the long-lasting one. I’ve stuck with them since I first discovered that highly-opinionated, sewer-stained monstrosity. And in the past couple years I was doing their weekly e-mail newsletter and am now finishing up all the new programming work for their big redesign.

But let’s go back to seventh grade. Like with everything in my life, I soon grew interested not just in the thing itself, but what makes it tick and eventually how I could do it myself. I first sprung for fan.starwars.com, which was once a fan site community hosted by the official “Star Wars” domain. My site was located at fan.starwars.com/apprenticenews and it seemed to be one of the most popular. To this day I don’t understand how they could tolerate hosting a site that gave away plot details for the prequel films. But they did and it was a great learning experience. Not content with strictly “Star Wars” “news,” I decided to launch a subsection titled “Rabid Cow’s Movie Page,” so named after my Internet nom de plume. It gave me a thirst for writing and I eventually moved everything over to my own domain, TheAverageJoes.Net.

TAJN’s (as it is called in shorthand) first design was heavily influenced by Cinescape’s use of frames as well as TheForce.Net’s left sidebar. It was my first real design without the help of a WYSIWYG editor. Not content with Frankensteining other people’s code and designs, I went all in: a garish, mishmash look that I was very proud of. I made some enhancements over time, a few minor changes, doubling the size of the right sidebar, adding some amazing staff members, getting a few hits and scoops and recognition.

Then I got burnt out halfway through high school and let the dream fade. Looking back now I see a lot of great stuff that really makes me proud and a lot of stuff that makes me cringe. Since then I’ve been teaching myself more advanced programming, enrolling in the Computer Science major at California State University, Long Beach, and just plugging away.

But now I’ve got the bug again. I’m going to take it slow, see how things pan out, and let you all in on my general interests. I don’t want to call this a blog because of personal reasons. This is a Web site. And on it I will be discussing movies, the world, and anything else that grabs my attention. It will have opinion, but I’d like it to have more fact than anything else. It will have personal entries, but I’d like it to have stuff that you care about as well. I’d basically like it to fulfill its name, its destiny: a place for the average Joe to come and think and maybe even learn a thing or two.

It will have this ugly design for a while until I have the time to give it the freshening up it deserves. Until then, please enjoy. Please comment. And please, stay average.