October 10, 2002
Why “Mega Man Home Page”? Well, it’s something of a misnomer. It’s also something of a long story, but hey, that’s what this section is for, so grab a bag of chocolate and I’ll explain.
MMHP originally began as a subsection of my student website (which is now defunct, seeing as to how I am no longer a student). The WWW wasn’t really big yet back in those days, so there weren’t yet any other Mega Man sites online. Therefore I didn’t have to worry about picking a title that was already in use. And because of this, I didn’t really have to put a whole lot of thought into the title at all. Consequently, “The Mega Man Home Page” was born.
As most know, the term “home page” these days generally denotes the main page of a website (typically the first one a visitor sees when he accesses the site). The word is also used for a browser feature which essentially allows the user to mark a specific page as his “home page” to be loaded automatically whenever a browser window opens.
But back when I created MMHP, the phrase “home page” was widely used to mean a website in general. It was common to see lines such as “Come visit my home page!” and “Welcome to my home page.” So I guess you could say, “The Mega Man Home Page” as used then was identical in meaning to the phrase “The Mega Man Website” now. Still pretty generic—but as I said, it didn’t occur to me to be creative.
Of course, as the use of the term “home page” evolved and it became increasingly evident that it was somewhat inappropriate for a site title, MMHP had already been known by that name for years. It really didn’t seem worth the effort and confusion involved to change it. Therefore, as a compromise, I kept the name but began adopting the shortcut “MMHP” as a more unique identifying mark. Hopefully that helps, a little. It’s not really much of an issue, I suppose, aside from being a misnomer. Although Yahoo did, for a while, refuse to list MMHP because the site title was too generic. But, that’s a story for another day...
- The MegaMaster