Jonsworld started out as "Jon's Page" on a lonely extension at Geocities. It was pretty much useless for a while until I stumbled upon a fun little demo of Animagic, and after a few fumblings with Microsoft Paint, I had created an under-ten-frames animated gif of an alligator devouring a stick-man. Not long after I had made a tiny library of crude animations, and "Jon's Page" became "Jon's Cartoon Page" (the official first version of Jonsworld).
After a while it got boring. After all, it was just one page with links to animated gifs. Yawn. So I spent grueling hours learning basic HTML and put together a wretched mess of frames and made some nifty images with Photosuite II to spiff it up a bit. After moving to a different Geocities address in April of 1998, and adding a new section for my pencil drawings and a really great animation called "Christmas Special '98," this became "Jon's Cartoon Page," version 2.0.
Suddenly, on June 18th, 1999, Geocities decided to take my site down without warning. I researched into the problem and their FAQ diagnosed that my problem was content on my page that violated "guidelines." Obviously this was a ridiculous notion because my site has NO questionable content whatsoever (*cough* see the disclaimer for details *cough*). But after I placed a really huge and annoying disclaimer on my page, they decided to put my site back up. However, I sat there and thought "enough is enough, I'm smokin' this joint" ("smokin'" as in "leaving really quickly" and "joint" as in "online host," don't get me wrong). What with a measly 11 megabytes of "space" ("cramped quarters" would be a more fitting title), mandatory banners or popups, and a terribly long, entirely un-rememberable domain extension name, I decided to find a more suitable host.
I found it at Crosswinds. Rare server crashes nonwithstanding, they, for the most part, gave me what I wanted. Free, unlimited web space, no banners or popups, and a short, choosable domain extension name. Finally, on July 7, I moved all my stuff over to my new home and settled down, where I've been living ever since (that is, electronically).
Soon I saw my hit counter spinning higher and higher, and I thought "my 2000th hit is coming up, maybe I should redesign my site!" So I did. On November 10, 1999, the 3.0 version of Jonsworld re-opened, just in time for the coming of the new 2000 year (don't get me started on that millenium junk because I really couldn't care less when it actually starts. I'm just glad we're out of the 19's).
New History, added 1-29-2001:
On September 17, 2000, Jonsworld 4.0 was officially up and running. The trouble was, around the New Year, Crosswinds started having problems with funding. Now Crosswinds was (and still is) great and all, but they were getting a little more bountiful in terms of server downtime; not only that, but they began to use POPUPS on the member pages! So, after careful consideration, Jonsworld was transferred over to Newtomorrow, a site hosted by a fellow named Troy.
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