I’ve never been the most tech-y person. I always leant more towards the humanities than STEM – so much so that my chemistry teacher ended up trying to explain various concepts to me using 2p and 1p coins (I still got an A at GCSE though, because I am a girly swot). Having said that, I am a digital native. I am probably the peak age for technology. We had ICT lessons at school, dial-up internet at home, Facebook launched in UK universities in my first year, and Blackberries and smart phones became standard as I was in the world of work. But, everything I grew up with was technology before the Apple-style minimalistic UX experience became industry-standard for technology. You had to poke around in menus, you had to try and find out how to do things, so I suppose I’ve always been curious about how to make technology do things.
What always surprises me though is when something I learnt about technology way back in the day creeps into my life now. That was the case this week at work.
My first exposure to html was through the website Neopets. For those too young to truly know Neopets, according to Wikipedia “Neopets is a free-to-play virtual pet browser game. First launched in 1999, the game allows users to own virtual pets (“Neopets”) and explore a virtual world called “Neopia.” … Players can buy digital food, toys, and other items for their Neopets to keep them happy. They can also customize the appearance of their Neopets by applying different colors, clothing, accessories, and styles. … Players interact with others through social features like message boards and guilds, or by buying, selling, and trading items with each other”.
I had a Blumaroo who is probably old enough now to vote, if voting by Neopets was allowed. I also had a full map that allowed me access to a secret laboratory and I would periodically adopt sad-named pets from the pound, zap them with the lab ray until they turned into a desirable colour/pattern and then put them up for adoption again. I played games (loved the meerkat one that was a version of Snake), I got my daily omelette and collected Blumaroo plushies. I loved it. I would have spent hours on there every day if it wasn’t for the need to periodically disconnect so that my mum could check the answering machine for any calls (mobile phones being less of a thing and the internet taking over our phone line).
One of the features of Neopets that, with hindsight, I can’t believe they had (god bless the early days of the internet) was the ability to create a personalised sort of landing page for your Neopet that you could create and customise using html. So, I had a misspent youth trying to do things with html. I don’t think it ever got any more complicated for me than adding images, changing the colour of fonts, creating lists, increasing font size and adding links, I certainly never got onto CSS styling or anything more complicated.
However, that basic understanding has proved to be a real asset in my current job. Nowadays most content management type systems have WYSIWYG functionality, but ours relies on added styling being added by another team. You don’t see it in WYSIWYG, but you see it on the front-end because it’s in the html version. And if that gets deleted in the WYSIWYG editor, it really does help to be able to go into the html, work out where the issues are, and fix them. Guess who can do that? Me! Why? Neopets. God bless Neopets, I’m still using what I learnt now, two decades on. Thanks Neopets Team.
