Celebrating 2^nd Anniversary: Some Reflections

Kishore C.S. (May 2001)

I have chosen the occasion of 2nd anniversary to reflect on what happened during these 2 years of my online presence:

How it all started:

I started in a humble way two years ago (May 1999) when I came to know that I can have a free homepage on http://members.rediff.com . I wanted to be different from lot of other personal homepages I have seen till then. I wanted to publish my 'own' content. Towards this goal I started writing my own articles. This started a new hobby for me. My long pending idea of writing articles unfolded and I have been able to add articles every month. It has been a new experience

Then I started sharing all the information I gathered to others through my homepage. My goal became to 'Share Information'. I started doing it regularly and sending e-mail to people whom I know personally.

One month of Fame:

When my homepage was selected 'Home Page of the Month' during Jan 2000, I was quite excited. I enjoyed the fame. I enjoyed receiving appreciative mails from people across India. I even made a few friends through this popularity and I am happy about. But this popularity made me ambitious. I wanted to become more famous. I think this can happen to anyone and it happened to me also. I thought 'I am great' and started promoting myself. I requested people to tell their friends and even created an ambitious goal of having 100 people on my mailing list. I started selling myself. I gradually found that I am making a mistake. My goal was to share my opinions, views, knowledge and experience and not to attract business. Then onwards I started concentrating improving the look and feel of home page.

Changes to home page

• I changed colors.
• I added Frames to my homepage to improve navigation
• I created mailing list Yahoogroups (egroups.com) and started sending a mail whenever I updated homepage
• I added photos

Move to my own domain:

After using rediff site for more than 20 months, I got suggestions from friends to have my own domain name and finally www.cskishore.com was born in March 2001 with active help from my brother who is in web site hosting business.

This gave a chance to improve the site by adding dynamic queries using ASP. Usage of style sheets to bring consistency to the look and feel of pages etc are now possible for me.

What it feels to have own domain and home page:

Since I have already enjoyed my moments of Fame as mentioned above, now I am content with the efforts I put in the site every month. Maintaining my home page is one of my hobbies which also gives me tremendous satisfaction as I am able to share my views with like minded people. I would be happy if people visit the home page and feel that they were able to learn from 'my experience'. I don't feel like advertising myself about my online presence anymore. I am not doing this for any commercial purposes.

What keeps me going:

All the mails I have received keep me going in putting efforts towards maintaining this home page.

Conclusion:

I realized that everyone goes through their own 'journey of life' and comes to terms with various experiences. We have something to learn from each other. Every one of us is unique but still have lot in common. We have unique talents, but common feelings. We have unique strengths, but common fears. We have unique goals, but common problems. Through my home page I tried to share my feelings, fears, problems and experiences in a frank and sincere manner so that someone can learn from my experience (my problems, fears, feelings). I feel happy whenever I receive occasional mail from people I have not met before that they found my 'article' good and interesting.

One more factor that motivated me is Gandhiji is saying "Anyword written with complete sincerity will be accepted by others". I found this quote in his book "My experiments with truth" and I tried to be as sincere as possible in my articles without any artificial flavor for public acceptance.

I myself visit my home page regularly to read articles I posted a few months back and it always helps me in refreshing my mind with lessons I learned and experiences I had. It is 'open diary' of my life.

I do hope my home page serves as a 'learning center' and a very useful ‘Resource’ in future and the little difference I am able to make to like minded people would give me tremendous satisfaction.

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