The JTB Story

In the beginning, my Mark Hamill corner of the web wasn't even a real website. In fact, it was made up of a humble 12 images and had no name. At the time, I had no internet connection of my own and depended on a friend.

It was 1996. I was 13.

I had only recently seen Mark Hamill on screen for the very first time as Luke Skywalker in STAR WARS. Fandom struck immediately, but without my own link to the World Wide Web, I didn't have a lot of resources at hand to educate myself on his career. At least I didn't know of any. And remember... I was 13. At first, I didn't really look beyond the character and was very into STAR WARS and Luke, both of which I love to this day.

When I finally got my internet connection and slowly began to familiarize myself with this medium, I started out with the obvious - a STAR WARS site. A little corner was reserved for Mark. It had, as I said, only pictures.

I also began to look into the actor, not just the character, and the more interviews I read and the more I looked at other appearances of his, the more I changed focus to Mark Hamill, not Luke Skywalker. And I wanted to do a proper website. Not just pictures. Something with substance to it.

Finally, in 2000, I felt ready. The hardest part was picking a name. In the end, I named my online baby "Just The Best", a title which might not be brilliantly original, but sums up perfectly why I am doing this site.

Ever since the site has flourished - with a forced hiatus of several years that I am happily breaking now. JTB has undergone a lot of changes over the years. I have never actually kept track of how many different layouts I had, so to say this is Version 12.0 is a very tentative guess. But I think it's close enough. I progressed from simple HTML tables to frames, and from frames to a very chaotic mixture of DIVs and tables, which mostly did what IT wanted and hardly what I wanted.... to finally arrive at a CSS layout. I haven't been as happy with any prior layout as I am today with this one.

For all its layout and programming weaknesses, I'm very proud of my little Mark spot. It might not live up to the websites of the pros, but it's mine and comes from the heart. It's my way to show the world how much I admire him and how much of a fan I am.

I congratulate you if you've come this far. And now I stop the babble and leave you to explore the site, so that you can see for yourself why I adore this man so.

Go back to Linkage & Site Stuff here.