Jimski.net has existed in one form or another since August of 1997 and is only getting older. It started as an AOL home page that I used as a journal of post-college life and its many, many, many foibles. Those entries, while still technically available online to those intrepid enough to seek them, are kept out of the parade because they embarrass me in at least three distinct ways:

• on a technical level (built with ease of use and “substance over style” pretensions, the pages themselves straddle the line between “designed for the blind” and “designed by the blind”)
• on a vocational level (they are terribly written, full of Dave Barry-wannabe-level prose, tortured similes, the phrase “of course” followed by things that are not at all natural, exclamation marks, the italics that I love so much, and parentheses, parentheses, parentheses, all giving the impression that they were written by the crazy guy at the bus station after a Red Bull)
• on a personal level (why spend all that time spitting invective at loved ones and complaining about personal problems with obvious solutions when you can just go to the printer and prepare everyone an engraved invitation to punch you in the face?)

But I guess the site always existed to help hone all of those applicable skills, and in the end I think that’s what it did. I finally left AOL and bought my own name in, oh, let’s say 2000, only to take several years off in 2001. Ryan then installed SnipSnap– holy crap, way back in 2003?– and gave me the hookup so that site maintenance would be easy, but the cure was worse than the disease (side effects include violent mood swings and crying blood). That brings us to May 2006, when the latest magnificence before you went online.

Here are some things you/I need to know about the site:

• anyone can comment on any post at any time. As of this writing, it is not even necessary for members of the Peanut Gallery to register or sign in. It’s like the wild west around here.
• registered users with IDs and passwords and the like will be able to do… things… with the site that others will not. Maybe even post entries just like a regular Jimski. Depends on my whim.
• When one uploads a file to the site– a picture to use in a post, for example– that file is stored here: http://jimski.nopaper.net/wp-content/uploads/[year]/[month]/[file]
• if you think the page you’re looking at right now is an eyesore, look over at the sidebar and find yourself the “StyleSwitcher.” To a certain extent, you can control what the site looks like to you. At the moment, you have a choice between four types of bad, but Rome wasn’t blinged out in a day.