During my first year of college from 1993 to 1994 almost everyone on campus was using the Internet in some form. Although some people couldn't tell the difference from their terminal, the VAX computer it was connected to or the wider Internet we were happy doing our e-mail, chatting on IRC, or failing classes from playing the proto-MMORPG known as MUDS. You could find some information online using GOPHER but it was a pain. I did access one of the first pages on the World Wide Web back in 1993 using TELNET. I thought it was pretty crappy and would never take off. Hyper linking? Bah! Luckily I didn't put that in writing anywhere at the time. During my second year we got the Mosaic web browser on campus and could start connecting graphically to the few web pages that existed. I don't remember much about those days, just that Mosaic was really slow and I still spent most of my non e-mail time on USENET. My college then offered web page accounts to the students and I started learning HTML.
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Here's what my first web page looked like. Unfortunately I don't have copies of the original page from 1994, but this one from 1997 didn't change much from the beginning. It was still a crude one page affair with some minor sub-pages. I can see from the hit counter start date that I installed that function in April of 1996. I didn't do much to update the page except change the text near the top once in awhile, or add a few links here and there. |
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At some point in 1998 I collapsed the "Good Things" and "Good Links" sections into separate sub-pages. The Good Links page is such a mish mash of bad formatting I'm too embarrassed to show it here. I guess I didn't take the time to learn the deep complexities of the HTML "table" tag. Many of the original graphics I used for the links still exist in shrunken iconified form in my current page of links. Note there are now two cheesy Japanese manga/anime images decorating the bottom. What was I thinking? After leaving Geneseo my page moved with me to my brief foray into graduate school and on to Japan. |
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When I moved to Japan I lost the access to my old UNIX accounts where my web page was hosted. So I had to host it with the free service at Tripod (now part of Lycos) which had all kinds of annoying pop up ads. When I finally got a computer and a broadband connection through DION of KDDI I was able to host the web page ad-free once more. Then in the summer of 2003 I did a major overhaul with some help by Paul McFedries' Idiot Guide. I added some CSS and Java. I cleaned up the links page by making small icons for each link arranged in a list. I repeated that pattern in the Good Things page and linked the subpages to some snazzy blue buttons. I even added a very basic page in Japanese. At this point my web page becomes almost like a blog with relatively frequent updates on my doings. I also put in more content in the form of photographs taken with my cell phone. |
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Finally we come to the Web 2.0! Just kidding. Despite swearing I would never do it, in 2006 I installed blog software. The default Wordpress template was pretty, but I wanted to make it consistent with the rest of my pages. So in that process I simplified the pages by adding more CSS, and got rid of most of the Java which wasn't doing much anyway except causing lots of warnings for IE users. I then created icons for the main page using pictures of my family, and put navigation links in the upper right. I made all the pages unicode UTF-8 as well so I can write Japanese. Yeah, the basic design is somewhat boring, but I like the simplicity. I don't think I will change things for a while, so for now this is it. |