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EnglishMaster, FriendsFair, ParaikoraNews and the era of WAP builders (2016 - 2017):
This was back around 2016, a time when many people still had a feature phone as their very first mobile device. My entry into this world was a second-hand Symphony B4i. It featured a basic mobile browser that had a peculiar quirk: it could only load websites if a memory card was inserted.
Before owning a phone, I used to explore the internet and Google whenever I traveled to town, using my brother's Toshiba Satellite C640-1072U laptop. It was on this laptop that I created my first Facebook and Gmail accounts. However, my actual first email address wasn't a Gmail account at all. Around this time, I discovered Dhakawap, FusionBD, and other media-sharing websites built mainly for feature phones. Dhakawap, in particular, ran a community forum alongside its download platform and provided a custom mailbox upon signup. That became the very first mailbox I ever created. FusionBD also had a similar online community named BDForum.NeT. One of the main reasons I explored these alternative online communities was because Facebook was completely inaccessible on my phone due to its low-specification hardware.
Driven by curiosity, I kept a physical notebook where I planned a website called EnglishMaster, designed to help users learn English. Once I got my hands on the Symphony mobile, I gradually discovered WAP builders like Wapego, Peperonity, Wapka, Xtgem and Wapkiz. Xtgem proved to be invisible to my phone, failing to render on such low-spec hardware. I explored Wapego and successfully brought EnglishMaster to life. This milestone sparked a wave of creation, quickly followed by FriendsFair: a community website inspired by the online forums I had fallen in love with. Next came a digital news portal named ParaikoraNews.
A Facebook group was created alongside the portal, as the website was primarily built to serve a local self-proclaimed community news outlet named Paraikora Gram Sangbad. During that golden era of the web, dot TK and dot ML domains were being offered completely free for a year, so I parked dot ML domains for all of my websites. Over time, Wapego was sunset, and with it, all of these early websites vanished. Today, not a single snapshot remains on the web, as the Internet Archive was entirely unknown to me at the time.
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