Once upon a time, in an earlier age of the Internet, the fastest and most effective way to “introduce” yourself on the web was to create your own “homepage”. It wasn’t necessarily the most straightforward thing in the world to do at the time (although some enterprising souls attempted to make this easier—GeoCities, in particular, comes to mind), but it did become popular among many ’net-connected teens and twentysomethings.

I was one of those individuals.

I’ve had several such websites over the years, essentially about Me and who I am and what I’ve done. A bit egocentric if looked at objectively and out of context—but, hey, it was my webpage, so that sort of thing was allowed.

In this new, more up-to-date, ruled-by-junior-high Internet, the concept of the “homepage” has all but vanished. People now maintain profiles on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Tiktok. These pages—with just some writing (sometimes), a basic template, images, and Comments From Your Friends—have now taken the place of the basic egocentric pages we used to cobble together back in the day.

(It’s so not fair. I didn’t even get to make it to my 30s before I got turned into some kind of rambling senior citizen type. Harrumph!)

In any case, egocentrism was certainly not limited to geeky individuals. Companies adopted this practice with equal vigor, creating the phenomenon known as “web portals” that many of us who remember those days quickly learned to fear and avoid. Some of them survive to this day—Yahoo was one of the originals which is still widely known—but for the most part they’ve faded, replaced by links back and forth propagated by the new common form of egocentrism (the “blog”—and I will always hate that word) and site aggregation utilities and websites.

Despite the fact that this was my least favorite manifestation of Web culture at the time, by my late twenties I found myself motivated to pay homage to it. I’d already more or less moved on from keeping All Information About Me in one spot on the Web, but try as I might, I couldn’t quite bring myself to drop the outdated idea of a Personal Homepage. It’s been over a decade since, and I find myself still clinging to the idea; this will probably be the way I get identified as an out-of-touch Old Person going forward. (Presuming, of course it isn’t already happening. Yew damn kids, git off mah Internet! )

In any case, this is my compromise action. This is my “web portal”. All I have here—apart from this rambling and my local voter's guides—are links to my various profile pages all around the Web. If you want to get to know who I am without actually having to go to the trouble of meeting me, this will probably be your best bet.

Here this story ends.

—Jo Valentine-Cooper, aka “Viqsi”
28 Sep 2007 / 15 May 2015 / 26 Jan 2021

• twitter.com/viqsin—Yes, I have a Twitter account. It’s mostly used for hockey talk, and maybe some politics now and again.
• viqsi.bsky.social—I’ve also got a BlueSky account, but it’s used even less. But hey, it’s there.
• facebook.com/viqsi—I do have a Facebook page, but I’d prefer Facebook just die off, so it’s... threadbare at best.
• nwcs.com—The family domain name, which we’ve owned for over three decades; my primary email address (using this domain) has a similarly impressive lifespan. This shows where I came from.
• github.com/Viqsi—I suppose you could call me a developer by trade, although not much of what I work on is public (yet) and what little I do exhibit on Github is highly personal hacks of very little use elsewhere (I was raised in a Subversion household and was very very late to the git party). Be that as it may, this here’s some tiny fraction of what code I’ve messed with.
• forums.hfboards.com/members/viqsi.60921/—Profile on HFBoards, a hockey fans messageboard (supposedly the largest on the Internet). I serve as one of the many, many moderators, in spite of my better judgement. Go Jackets!
• baboonfurnace.org—Funny story, this. That hockey fans message board? It used to have a Politics section. But it was removed. So I helped give that sub-community a new home. The majority of the folks here are far more left-leaning than I’ve ever been in my entire life, but I frankly don’t see that as a serious issue (and I’m not exactly alone there, either).
• mathmed.org—Mathematical Medicine LLC, a statistical genetics and data curation research organization. My current employer (as well as that of my parents; it’s a bit of a roundabout story).
• nationwidechildrens.org/research—The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. I used to work for the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine here, but then that center was absorbed into another, so my PI and coworkers moved on to MathMed (see above).
• tbsohio.org—My synagogue, for which I’d provided IT support for just over half my life. Previously was also my sole employer for nearly a decade, which made me the “senior employee” (except for our since-retired Senior Rabbi, who got started before I was born, so he had an unfair advantage).
• thirdhand.org—Third Hand Bicycle Cooperative, another organization I’ve historically done volunteer IT work for. I don’t ride bikes myself, but just because it’s not my thing doesn’t make it unworthy of support.
• shifti.org/wiki/User:Viqsi—Profile on shifti.org, which is probably now the most visible gathering point for the online TF (TransFormation fiction) community; I really don’t get into this stuff anymore, but I met a lot of my current friends this way (heck, it’s why I go by “Viqsi” to begin with), so it’s not as though I can just walk away. There’re some (horrifyingly embarrassing) stories that I’ve written here, too.
• google.com/search?q=viqsi—This should cover anything I’ve missed.