The “Ballermann Syndicates” site was the first website I ever published. It was first hosted at snafu.de which was my ISP in 1995 and moved to the famous xoom.com hosting. It started like most private webpages do today: As a site with nearly no content, a lot of animated gifs and no concept (I wish I had a screenshot of the beginning)

This page was always a testfield to me. There I tried all the new features of webdesign I discovered on my “journeys through the web” . I made heavily use of JavaScript. For example the screenshot on the left has a complete JavaScript-driven menu. I tried embedding MIDI-files (oh how I hate that today when a website does that). And of course my site was designed for Microsofts Internet Explorer in the most actual version with a big resolution only. In short: I made all the errors of webdesign one can make .

But with the time there came content and slightly more compatibility. In 1997 I started to write short stories and poems. I also did some paintings later. Nothing great but not too bad at all. I started to publish my writings, learned how to do the “marketing” for a site (like URL submitting to searchengines and stuff) and redesigned my site every three months . I also used real-audio to bring some of my poems alive. Well, at least the few people that visited my site seemed to like it - and that was a little success for me.

I stopped maintaining the site shortly after finishing school in 1999. Meanwhile I had started my RAF-Infosite, where I tried to avoid all the mistakes I made at “Ballermann Syndicates” from the beginning…

Luckily I still have a copy of the 99's version available. Visit bms.splitbrain.org if you understand German.