The profession of Webmaster is dying. Everyday people now make websites and blogs with the help of websites like godaddy.com. Sure it costs money, but for most of us 10 dollars a year is negligible. I own several domain names, and as of today one more. I’m now in the habit of buying domains when I get a good idea as a way to financially motivate me to follow through with them.  Having a website also reminds me of my ideas. Besides, designing websites is my hobby.

My first website was hosted on brunslo.com my freshman year of high school. If you know how to use the wayback machine, you can find out what my first l33t coding skills were like. If something actually impresses you, its probably because I stole most of the code from elsewhere on the net. But who doesn’t do that now? (Creative Commons licensed of course!)

I wanted a website of my own, so I bought MastermindEnterprises.com. Now, it’s defunct because I have yet to start up my own business. Although when I do, I’m all set with a domain name, trademark and slogan. This kept me satiated for years, but my itch to have more websites to design got too strong and I bought MastermindIndustries.com. I’m not sure why, but its only use was to save information about a DnD game I played in college.

Now I had a theme, and shortly thereafter I got another reason to make a website. Worldsim.org was home to a diceless role playing game that simulated Earth and a thousand variants thereof. It was a place for me to get my players to check out information and appreciate my webskillz.

Skip foward a few years and you get omnifriend.net. A team effort by myself and the owner of 3dgo.net to make an RSS reader for all formats of personal weblog (LJ, Blogger, etc), with comments. Its dead/down now, but was a great exercise in open source development. Our project can be found on sourceforge under the name OmniFriend.

This month I’ll be giving a presentation on gaming life in the USA. I’m a gamer, and naturally gravitate towards chances to bring more people into the fold and show them how awesome and varied games are. So as part of my preparation I created ultra simple character sheets for the attendees. Some of whom only know survival English. Molly noted that my sheets looked like ‘gateway’ version of the game. Someone who plays this will probably go on to more ’serious’ D&D gaming. Enter gatewaygames.net There’s nothing there yet so I’m not linking you there, but when I do I’ll be sure to let you know.

Long live the webmaster!

BTW, I do host websites for a very small fee. I’ll setup your hosting, get you a domain name, and setup a website/blog. If you are looking for a way to get a small internet presence and don’t like the big faceless companies, I can do business anywhere in the world. Please get in touch.