who was moyra?

In the chaotic web of the late 1990s, the enigmatic artiste Moyra seemed to believe that if we didn't respect creators, the web would turn gray. Was she right? Wrong? Short-sighted? Ahead of her time? I really don't know. Draw your own conclusions. Anyways...

Technically, I created my first website in the mid-1990s. I did this not so long after visiting my first website, actually. I remember my stepmother (Jennifer), a kind and normal woman, sitting with me and showing me a site simply called the Pug Dog Homepage. She showed me how the webmaster of the site was collecting (precious, at the time) digital pictures of the pug dogs having fun, and other tributes to pugs. When Jennifer showed me that she had submitted a digital picture of her Princess (a small “back-bred” pug) to the page, it opened a world for me. For some reason, I found it so enthralling that a simple picture of our dog could end up on such a site.

I knew I wanted to experience website creation myself. Thankfully, America Online's WYSIWYG website builder allowed anyone (and I mean anyone) to create a passable site (for the time, anyways) rather quickly. With it, I was able to craft a small, messy page dedicated to my own pet dachshund, Gretchen. I added gifs of sausage dogs and uploaded a small blurry photo of her. My memory’s quite the colander about this, but it must’ve been quite a silly site, and I doubt anyone actually visited it besides my family looking to see Gretchen.

After that, the floodgates were opened, though. There was no turning back. Over the next few years, I’d read as much as possible about the Internet and web design in my school’s underfunded library and beyond. I visited more and more sites about webweaving, too. Inevitably, I came across some offering free linkware templates, including the lush and beautiful Moyra.com.

Moyra.com was the creation of the enigmatic Moyra, as you might’ve guessed. Her last name might’ve been something starting with an L - it was unclear, and sources vary, reporting it differently. I cannot remember how it was spelled when it was sparsely mentioned on the site.

Moyra was a prominent member of an organization called the Digital Divas, an early online collective of forward-thinking and creative women who worked with web design, either as a hobby, professionally, or both. They would end up facing off with Microsoft (yes - Microsoft) and winning when the latter tried to pilfer the name “Digital Diva” for a smarmy advertising scheme. Nowadays, the name “Digital Divas” sadly belongs to some weird AI company - but back in the early 2000s, it belonged to these gals and them alone, and even Bill Gates wasn’t taking it from them.

Moyra preferred to call herself an artiste, not merely a web designer. Her designs were highly elaborate, often with what I now recognize to be occult or astrological themes. On certain pages, she even mentioned taking inspiration from the sky. I originally found her because her site showcased gorgeous linkware templates, suitable for a huge variety of online projects. Almost all of them eschewed the new-fangled <div>s and other CSS features in favor of using <table> tags with a nifty border=0 in the midst for formatting.

She was far from alone in this - in fact, plenty of web designers from the late 1990s and even into the early to mid (!) 2000s would recommend using <table>s for formatting. This was seen as inclusive, since not all browsers supported cascading stylesheets at the time. Plus, some viewed this new technology with suspicion. Using <table> tags was an easy compromise, and very aesthetic at times…

She ran two operations online. One was Artiste Productions. I never investigated it overmuch - it seemed to be a web design company for those interested in paying her to design their own sites. I’m sure many, many people came to her for this, because her work seemed quite top tier at the time. Nowadays you might glance at it and see the <table> tags and chuckle, but back then, this was not only accepted, but encouraged by most. There weren’t many alternatives yet.

Artiste productions seemed rich, complicated, and, above all, adult - something for me as a preteen (and I was a preteen) to admire. It solidified her as a weird, distant role model with no clear voice nor face, but beautiful, beautiful pixels. I wanted so much to interview her for my school’s paltry “career day” festivities that year, but alas, there was an in-person, face-to-face requirement. Instead, I had to ask my cousin about her wonderful job working as an insurance salesperson, but… anyways…

The linkware sets, which Moyra referred to as the Web Jewels, were aptly named. They were the absolute jewels of her site, and absolutely pulsed with delightful energy, unabashed wonder and expansiveness even in such a new and (relatively) unfamiliar medium as the internet. I loved each and every set, and there were so many.

Some of these linkware sets featured background images and scrolls of gifs to plop on top of them, assuming you’d have a relatively static site. Others included elaborate interfaces with Javascript mouseover effects. On the cusp of my teenaged years, I started with the simpler ones, but quickly learned how to use the more complicated web sets on offer. I was always mindful of copyright, and what Moyra referred to as “The Eleventh Commandment.”

The Great Spider Goddess looked down from the starred heights which She inhabits and into the Web of Her Creation and wept, yeah, verily, She wept for the artists and writers and programmers, for the few gifted beings to whom She gave her greatest of all presents : An Original Thought. She sobbed as though her Great Arachnid Heart would shatter for the sad fate to which this Great Gift of Hers, the World Wide Web, had succumbed...

And in Her Crazed Grief, the Holy Arthropod wove a Magical Tablet of Electrons, a Great Message to Her People, so that Her Beloved Creators should be safe from depredations and plagiarism, so that Her Artists, Programmers and Writers may continue to freely share their Gifts with the World without fear of Insult or Robbery.

Thou shalt not plagiarize others' work by claiming it as thy own, even if thou adaptest it to thy own needs or recreatest it. And before thou makest free with anothers' creation, thou shouldst receive the permission of the copyright holder and abide by his or her rules.

The beginning of Moyra’s (rather long, florid, and romantic) 11th Commandment (viewable on the Wayback Machine under “Eleventh” on this page).

Moyra, as you can probably guess from the above, was much about copyright, as were her compatriots in the Digital Divas. This was probably why they were able to fight Microsoft ffs about it and win. In particular, they organized a yearly event they called GreyDay. GreyDay, if I remember right, usually took place in November (??). On GreyDay, all participating sites (that is, anyone that wanted to be part of it) would put up a link to the GreyDay homepage and make their site entirely gray, removing any beautiful graphics.

The site itself shared a message about how, were we disrespectful of intellectual properties, this would be the web we could expect. Gray and without color, without art, without soul and personality. In other words, Moyra (who I believe must’ve been a major force behind GreyDay) and the rest wanted the web to know that without respect for creators, there would be no creations. It was accompanied with messages extolling folks to link back to the creators of graphics whenever asked or possible, and never crib without permission… after all, if we did that, the web might turn gray.

And it did, didn’t it?

The web really did get all washed-out and devoid of spirit a few years later. Facebook, especially, dropped a bridge on the concept of the personal website and design of one, and soon sites like Twitter, Instagram, etc would continue that trend. Tumblr was a notable exception initially, but with a froth of discourse and mean spirits, it was no place for creators, either.

Truthfully, I can’t say Moyra and the gang were right, per se. It’s not as if little kiddies cribbing each other’s images or code had anything to do with this washout. Instead, it was corporations, who poured a veritable bucket of gray paint over the internet itself. Perhaps this is why the Digital Divas found their greatest enemy in Microsoft (who they ultimately vanquished, if only for a time)? Either way, they did have a point that a lack of respect for the creative expression of the individual and an unwillingness to make room for it would be the web’s undoing. Sadly, we saw that… sort of.

Moyra herself? She vanished a few years later. Her own site would remain up for the next decade, with a simple placeholder image. It showed a stylized face, which I suspect was her own. I can’t be sure, but it looked a bit like the other images, like the one of her with the parrot, etc. I have prosopagnosia, so I don’t know. I hope she found happiness, even if she quit the web.

I came across a website or two reminiscing about her sense of style and fanciful designs many times, especially in the indie web community, but no, I’ve never seen or heard from anyone who knows anything about what happened to her. I hope she’s still out there, actually, and perhaps now she enjoys CSS and the depths of modern Javascript in ways I could never imagine. At the same time, I wonder if her charm and aesthetics could possibly still be alive in today’s gray (…yes…) social media wasteland. Maybe she is off doing astrology instead?

Either way, I hope my childhood internet heroine is leading a happy life. I made a playlist dedicated to her, inspired by the sheer vibes of the 1990s. I don't expect she would've enjoyed it, but it is my sort of tribute to that time...

Please note: If you hear (well, read) the name Moira Winters, that is not Moyra of Moyra.com. They are definitely not the same person. I know that because Moira Winters and I are (shall we say) quite close. Joined at the hip, even.