When I was about eight years old, my father bought me a Cix account. This came with a domain name All Of My Very Own. The page he showed me how to build from scratch still exists, much to my dismay and more as a historical record than anything else. It's not impossible to find, or I suspect even particuarly hard. I even linked to it from LJ once.
So I got older, and stopped using the Cix domain. Throughout my childhood and early teens I ran various webpages from various places-Geocrap, Homethingy, Angelshite. The number of obscure corners of the internet with my name on them is, quite frankly, ridiculous. I got older, we lost the internet connection at home, I got into LiveJournal and web forums. I even have a MySpace, for my sins. I used Photobucket for image hosting, Hotmail for emails. And then, after a while, these accounts started to implode on me, as they are wont to do. And one day, after one too many embarrasing bandwith issues, I got an email from a good friend of mine telling me that www.persephonehazard.co.uk was up and open for business.
O'Reilly to the rescue much? Seconds later I realised that everything I ever knew about HTML, about coding and CSS and SMTP protocols had been lost somewhere in the depths of a brain saturated with internet moderating, living the life of a soap opera and copious quantities of gin. And so there I was, sat in the living room on a freezing Sunday afternoon in December, with a koala-covered tome lying on the desk in front of me.
The result isn't that bad, really. At some point I'll put some more stuff up on it.