In my high-school days when the web was young, I started making websites. The first one was a Goldeneye fansite. I’ve scoured the wayback machine and angelfire (where it was hosted) and have never been able to locate it.
At some point my friend Steven Hill started calling me sejje, which is a couple of iterations of switching syllables or saying things backwards, starting with my first name. I took that as my online handle and ended up with sejje.net, which I used as a blog. Back then they didn’t say blog, though–we called them Everything/Nothing sites. I’d post funny stuff, but I didn’t really tell anyone about it besides my close friends.
One day my best friend Biggie was visiting his father, the next city south of ours (a 20-minute drive). He went to the library for something, and some kid in the library was looking at my website. He told me about it and my head’s already-too-big size tripled instantly.
On the last day of regular class as a senior, I wore my sejje.net hat to school and the kid who had been my lab partner the entire year saw it and said “YOU’RE SEJJE!?” He had been reading my site for a couple of years. Cue head inflation.
Eventually I lost sejje.net to a domain squatter for a year and it killed the community I had going, which I believe peaked at 350 members.
I think both of those things helped spur me to continue developing for the web, though nothing ever has been as popular as sejje.net was back then. It made it fun that yes, real people were reading and enjoying my website.