Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog

Published December 11th, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran

Self-Archeology and Internet Nostalgia

Jeremy discovered that he’s been publishing
stuff on the web for 10 years, and issued the challenge…

Anyone else wanna showcase your ancient web sites? The more ugly and personal the better!

I certainly haven’t been at it for 10 years (probably closer to 8 years), but my personal home page has been through several evolutions. Each of the versions is named after the dominant background colour of the page…

“Grey” - Was the original version of my home page at http://www.senet.com.au/~jim/ … I can’t find it online anywhere anymore, but I do still have the HTML on my home machine. Grey was created using MS-DOS Edit, and was basically an edit of my Netscape Bookmarks file. In fact the page was created because my bookmark menu got too long.

“Blue” - Came a couple of years later. I downloaded a Beta of Microsoft Frontpage (probably 97) so I created a brand new site with it to celebrate. Wayback machine has a copy of “blue” from July 1997. Despite the promise on the home page I didn’t ever update the site. IE5 broke the ActiveX puzzle thingy and I never got around to fixing it. This was obviously during my “pro-Microsoft” phase.

“Black” replaced “blue” early in 2000 sometime. Again I think acquiring another web design tool prompted a brand new web site. Although this one was updated with new photos from time to time it largely didn’t change at all. The final version of “black” has been linked from my weblog ever since I did my current design. Black started life on SE Net, but was later moved to work, them moved again when I got my own domain name.

“Blog” - Okay, its not a colour, but its been the most sucessfull oy web sites. I installed MT on a server at work to play with it, and it went through a couple of host names there before it got moved onto www.jimohalloran.com where it now lives. Initially my blog used Jeremy’s CSS, but that was soon changed to a very similar design which moved a few things and had a maroon theme instead of Jeremy’s blue. Later the design was changed again to what you see here today. There’s still things I’d like to sort out with the design, but I’m very happy with it.

My blog seems to have been the only site which I’ve actually stuck with and kept updating. In fact I my blog is almost 12 months old now!

Unfortunately the wayback machine doesn’t have copies of some of my other early web design efferts either. The first pages I did for Pedders was a beuty (I think they (the customer) called the background colour “porn Star Yellow”), and the KCS one wasn’t much better.

| Post in Personal |