Hello and welcome to my website! A few things about my place;
Last modified: 01-28-2025
The story of my website begins in September of 2021. One of my friends, Amateur Bartender Man, had discovered Neocities and went down the whole "web revival" pipeline. Eventually he ended up making his own website. With my interest piqued, I made my own shortly thereafter.
I wouldn't start to seriously work on my site seriously until a couple weeks had passed. Once I did I immediately fell in love with the self expression that a personal website offered. In contrast to the dull minimalist UI that holds a nigh monopoly on modern social media platforms, my website truly felt like a space where I could express anything.
The first incarnation of my website was known as Coffin Corner, the URL being coffin-corner.neocities.org. The name origined from the "coffin corner" punt, a technique in American football used to give the opponent unfavorable field position. I had become rather enthralled with 19th century football history, so I decided to theme my site around it.
One thing that me as well as my friend has resolved to do was learn HTML from scratch for our websites. I still remember struggling with understanding how tables worked like it was yesterday. It's really enjoyable to look through these old copies of my site, especially this particular one and see how far I've come. Even if I am still quite atrocious at HTML. I began to focus mostly on writing about early college football as well as early NFL teams, though I never did do as much as I had wanted to in part because I was still designing the layout. The UI is very simple and straightforward but I remember being happy with it at the time.
Eventually I would decide to revamp my site, though it was still built from the same base. I would finish the games page and redo the front page. This was also when I adopted my website's current main font, the "Return of Ganon" font. I had also fleshed out the football page a good deal by this point, it being much more navigable and easy on the eyes than before.
Despite having put much time into this revamp however, I eventually decided that table only layouts were limiting my ability to make something creative. My old sites looked... competent, and I guess decently good for a beginner. But I felt they lacked character if that makes sense. Here is the final version of Coffin Corner. Eventually realizing that I couldn't devote myself mostly to one topic, as well as the fact that I was losing interest in sports, I once more rebranded my website.
In November of 2023, I finished the revamp. I had uprooted everything completely from scratch; it was my first time using a div based layout with every image having a different background, which I had courted much of my inspiration to make from Melps. I also got quite a few ideas from the website of Rampancy, namely the banner scrolling section and idea to make a button wall that progressively gets smaller.
A fun fact is that I had originally designed this layout to match that Osaka windows XP picture because I thought it amusing, but as time went on I decided it'd be better to make the colors more homogenous so as to look more true to old web design conventions. Throughout this redesign this was a philosophy I stuck to; I ditched the whole "every page a different color scheme" ethos of my previous looks. I had garnered an interest in making my site look like sort of a half way point between web 1.0 and early web 2.0 designs.
So basically, incorporating elements of both Geocities-like design namely in the extensive gif usage, and a bit of mid to late 2000s website design with the rigid categories & amount of text neatly organized on the screen. Another focus was to make things navigable while being densely packed; this ethos as well as the image below were what inspired my control panel.
The name I chose was Mayflower. This was a triple reference. The first was that "May" was the shortform for my online alias, the second being that the Mayflower was a historical ship, and the third that there was a local business named that which I have a fair bit of nostalgia for having went to at a young age. Unfortunately, the name on Neocities had been taken so I had to use "Mayfl0wer" for the URL (mayfl0wer.neocities.org).
Due to the fact that I had started from scratch and the high amount of time it took to finish this layout (at least 15 hours), I found myself neglecting the website. My site felt so far away from being functional that it demotivated me for a while. You can see a blog post I wrote about it here if you want, but in short it took me a very long time to get everything in a functional state.
Looking at it now, you can certainly see how the small incrimental changes have added up over time from this 2023 version of my layout compared to the current one. I am personally quite proud of my site as it is, and have no intention of ever redesigning it. I did however rebrand my website in January of 2025. This was for a few reasons.
Chief among which is that Mayflower... I just don't think it's a very good name for a website. It's quite long and is drowned out in search results by the ship. Not only that but I didn't even get the original name, my URL was Mayfl0wer which was kind of ugly. I had also kind of come to associate the name, right or wrong, with the long period of inactivity and demotivation I went through after completing the new UI.
As such, I decided to rename my website once again. To force myself to commit to this name, I went through the trouble of acquiring a domain as well. My new name MayDB appears readily on search engines, is nice, short and memorable, and also fits the purpose of my website well.