Scary old stuff
In late 1994, I remember finding an email gateway that let me retrieve HTML pages via POP3. It was awesome. Eventually, though, I discovered these things called browsers... And started churning out pages of my own. Meticulous archiver that I was, I kept copies of them all...
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Kidstuff Magazine
The summer I turned 10 years old, I started publishing a zine I called "Kidstuff." An Atari 800XL, a daisywheel printer, and a pile of paste-up boards launched a project that dominated 7 years of my life. By the time the web started to take off, the project had already faded out, but a long weekend with a scanner turned all the old issues into PDFs. Amusing? Scary? All of the above.
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Mac Reviews Digest
I spent a bit of time tinkering with HTML, and when AOL gave their users a bit of FTP space, I put up my shingle reviewing software. Witness the amazing drop shadow! Admire the hyperlinks! Enjoy the... um... Yeah. Wow, that sucker was spartan.
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Cornerstone: Off the Beaten Path
Cornerstone was (and is) the granddaddy of Christian music festivals. Thousands of youth group kids, goths, hippies, punks, and other assorted religious folks show up in the middle of rural Illinois for a week of music, arts, fireworks, and general good-natured mayhem. I went, armed with my shiny new digital camera, and documented the whole thing. In the days before everyone's cat had a TLD, this site got mad crazy traffic.
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The Kumquat Kuriosity's Home Page Of Fun
It's really best not to ask. I will say, though, that I spent hours searching Yahoo! and taking pictures with my 640x480 digital camera to get all those little images floating around.
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Hope Station: Awakening
The infrequently-updated home page for an online roleplaying game run by several friends and I. Oh, the fun we had. Oh, the telnet connections we kept alive! I think there are a few RPG MOOs left running, like folks who still listen to wax cylinders.
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Diary of a Mongoose
There's a light at the end of the tunnel: by this time, I was starting to use CSS, and I was playing around with the now-cliche funky 50's art. I was also running things off of my own domain name, as evidenced by the page title. Some days, I'm sad I let dancingmongoose.net go...
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jce
Yeah, this is about the time black web pages turned into the cool new thing. I ended up going lo-fi, using a ballpoint pen and a scanner for all the titling, and hand-drawing frames for all the photos I posted. It's very much the angst-filled poetry phase of my web history.
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the verb is what's going on
Turn of the century, baby. I whipped up a new design with a slightly less angsty feel. Naturally, the links were all embedded as imagemap regions. Remember suck.com? My links section does. For the terminally curious, the random gibberish is actually the genetic code for the HIV virus. It seemed appropriately hardcore.
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Predicate dot net
In 2001 I registered my first domain -- predicate.net -- and stuck up what I felt was a pretty cool little site. It ran ASP, and it did things like randomly shuffling images and linking to random web pages. I still kind of like the look, though the url itself has long since been absorbed by domain-poachers.
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Predicate dot org
By 2003, most of my energy had drifted to hardcore Livejournaling and spawning of novelty domain names. I'd moved my home page to predicate.org instead of .net, and rolled out a test-pattern look that typified mystery meat navigation.
