Well, it’s been a long, grueling weekend of HTML coding, but at long last, www.barryploegel.com is finally ready for its auspicious launch. In a scant matter of hours, Barry Ploegel will no longer be solely a carbon-based, off-line property. That’s right: Barry Ploegel is poised to take the leap into cyberspace!
The purpose of barryploegel.com shall be twofold: First, it shall enable anyone to access all the information they desire about me at the touch of a button. Second, upon my death, the site shall serve as a monument to all that I was. Future historians need not wonder who this enigmatic “Barry Ploegel” fellow was. They need only access my site to find an abundance of photos of me, a selection of MIDI Music that I composed, and excerpts from my very own Babylon 5 fan fiction.
And no one, be they the common man or the loftiest scholar, shall accuse my site of lacking Barry Ploegel info. Oh, the treasures which the curious shall find! A complete rundown of the pets I have owned! A list of my favorite Sam Raimi movies! I am even developing plans to place a picture of myself and my girlfriend on the page. That plan is currently in the reading-the-personal-ads stage.
No matter what interest of mine you’re interested in, barryploegel.com is sure to have it. For the lover of my love of fantasy art, there will be scans of Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta paintings. For the lover of my love of FPS games, there will be tips on titles ranging from Half-Life to Unreal Tournament. And should you desire a little adventure of your own, treat yourself to a downloadable Quake III mod that enables you to play the game as Darth Maul!
Weary from your long cyberstroll? Why not pause to sign the guest book? I’d love to hear what you think of the site. After all, your enjoyment is my number-one priority. That’s why I registered the domain name barryploegel.com rather than setting up my site through GeoCities. Sure, GeoCities would have been cheaper, but who needs all those ads and pop-up windows? Certainly not you. At barryploegel.com, nothing stands between you and the wonderful world of Barry Ploegel.
There are other services my web site shall offer, as well. Suppose someone has forgotten the address of one of my favorite sites, like pythonline.com, tmbg.com, or theforce.net. Simply go to barryploegel.com, and they’ll all be right there in one place! As I collect links to other great web sites, I eventually hope to make my site a kind of universal portal to all of the best destinations on the net.
But, of course, the focus of the site will always be the enigma that is Barry Ploegel. As goes my life, so shall go my site. All of my many triumphs and tragedies will be inscribed in the dark-blue, Helvetica-fonted characters that leap off the site’s black background. Like the many characters from mythology who can be summoned simply by shouting their names, I will be similarly accessible by entering my name in the browser window.
One hundred years from now, after I’ve departed this mortal coil, my great-grandchildren will no doubt wonder who this ancestor of theirs was, what he believed in, with whom he hung out on weekends. All they’ll need to do is type in my name and they shall have their answer. They will know that long ago, the patriarch of their proud clan played trombone and was a huge fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Barry Ploegel shall live on forever.
