The name Comprak was simply the synthesis of my name with the computer company, Compaq. In 1997, The original intent of the site was to build and sell computer hardware and systems, so an original name was needed. To this day, it’s my belief that the name ‘Comprak’ is the most innovative creation I’ve made, to date, ever. My unoriginality aside, with the opening of the account signaled an undertaking that was technically illegal by the Terms of Agreement from Geocities. Upon learning that, coupled with the extreme laziness both myself and my partner in this venture had, the page forever implored visitors to ‘keep checking back’.
After a great deal of guilt, I decided to make a personal homepage. You see, at the time of this decision, the internet was not yet the commercialized information system it currently is now; it’s hard to imagine, but at one time, the world wide web was a place where different genders and nationalities were able to meet under the guise of ‘netizen’ – the virtual incarnation of Marxist thought. Perhaps it’s this image that still drives me to make a site worth visiting, even in the face of grander, more elaborate sites which offer more and do more than I could possibly imagine.
This homepage consisted of a few links, some irrelevant information, poor font choice and irrationally used HTML tags. It’s next incarnation, which followed only months later, wasn’t much better, but it was preferable over the previous site. By this time, though, I felt a greater need to make a worthwhile site, one with a spiffy new HTML invention called frames. Furthermore, I was to travel to India shortly, a lengthy trip that would see me travel up and down the country. Shortly thereafter I was to commence my career of higher learning, at college, namely Lehigh University. For this I wanted to ‘leave my mark’ on the internet, a site which would be the end-all of amateur created sites. From this, what I call the ‘Initial Completion’ was born, a site that I left on the web for several years. The site admittedly was not very well done, didn’t have the content that I had hoped, was a nightmare to maintain, and not quite what I had envisioned. However, it had it’s moments of creativity, and I think, given the circumstances, it was pretty good.
Fast forward to my junior year of college, where I learned that the site was no longer working properly in Internet Explorer. I had by this time gotten sick of the site, and decided to take it down and start anew. From there multiple filler pages were made, temporary holdings promising future grandeur but producing nothing. Still feeling the urge to make something even better than ‘Initial Completion’, but with focus on high speed loading and interesting content, I toyed with many different layouts and colors. I wanted the site to be easily accessible, so the focus then was on a multi-tier environment with the third tier as the primary area for content. Other incarnations of the site focused a great deal more on delivering content at the second tier, but it’s my feeling that updates and content could be added with greater ease, and navigation would be simpler with a greater hierarchy. Thusly, the site stands for a deviation from all the previously held web design principles except one – to make a site worth visiting.
That too didn’t last very long. Geocities by this time had become too difficult to use and maintain, so I struck out with an upstart company called F2O, or freedom 2 operate. They gave me free webspace to do as I please, without banner ads. The only caveat was the server would be unstable.
For two years, I experimented with a variety of web technologies. In 2004, in a radically shift in thinking I started using the blogging program ‘Moveable Type’ with a completely overhauled layout and design. It took nearly six months to complete.
Right before my wedding, my wife and I purchased webspace on Godaddy’s servers. At the same time, f2o was experiencing even more outages. Alongside our domain and webspace, I purchased the comprak.net domain. Moveable Type did not work particularly well on Godaddy’s servers, so I switched to wordpress and have been using that ever since.
Comprak.net is a subdivision of our main site, and is currently powered by wordpress.