| Jan212009 | My HTML History |
I think I’m going to start using other people’s blog posts as a launching pad for my own. I’m really all screwed up about what I want to blog about these days. Or you know, I could just sell out and post photos of women in bikinis all day long.
Anyway, Deutlich talks about her old BackStreet Boys fansite. It makes me think about the unlikely story (ahem) that led me to where I am today with the web development skills that I have. Allow me this 1000-word traipse down a sepia-toned memory lane of HTML.
Somewhere in the late ninties, I was making pages in Netscape Composer, the free WYSIWYG HTML editor that was bundled with the Netscape browser. I think it was actually quite good for its time. Not as whiz-bang as some of the other editors out there but it was a great starter kit and not as evil as trying to create HTML in Microsoft Word.
Being a high schooler, I was a big fan of putting scary red text on black backgrounds. It was pretty badass. Sadly, I had no content. I had a desire to create a form but no associated function. A battle that I still fight to this day. I think I slapped on an email address, a guestbook and maybe a membership to a web ring.
In the year 2000, I moved on to Macromedia Dreamweaver 3. Professional web development software that I obtained through entirely legal means on my vast income of $0.00 per month. It was a step above and I started getting familiar with the code underneath the surface. By now, I had moved on to Tripod for my free webhosting. I think my website was called “Bullshot” or something like that. It was pretty much a precursor for every web page I’ve done since. I used it to bitch about life, bitch about myself, and write stories about my imaginary girlfriend of the time. (Haha! Yeah, Jack is crazy.) I think there were a few parts that were actually well written, if you’d believe that.
This was the time of what I like to think of as “manual blogging”. You copy and paste a previous post you wrote and then edit the title and content manually. Change the file name and upload it back. Update all the other pages so they point to this new page. Viola, new blog post. It was very quaint and repetitive, like churning butter.
2001 and 2002 saw the beginning of the demise of free sites like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. They were still free but they started imposing more restrictions like 5MB of space and all sorts of banners, frames and pop-ups. Somehow, I got into the invitational community of the now-deceased DigitalRice.com. Some dude just gave us free hosting on a subdomain and we even had Perl and PHP scripting enabled. I tinkered around with a few different things until I finally discovered version 2.5 of Movable Type.
I continued to roll my own HTML code in Dreamweaver and create my own custom themes for Movable Type. I think my site went through 3 or 4 iterations until DigitalRice.com finally shutdown sometime in mid-2003. Supposedly for some sort of re-working of the sites features so we’d have all new community stuff. It never came back online. I never got my files back. Which was good because that blog had a pretty detailed account of how I got smitten over a girl, invited her to our “senior prom” (in Australia, we called it something different), convinced all my nerd friends to get dates, and then was promptly canceled on. But that’s all behind me and she wasn’t a very nice person anyway.
Late 2003, I was well into freshman year of college (I can hear my Australian friends cringing as I use these US-centric terms), but it annoyed me no end that my blog was trapped and I couldn’t get it back. In October 2003, after an impatient 30 days, I signed up for hosting with Quost.com.au (check out their logo) and registered boxofjack dot com. To this day, I still can’t give you a good reason for this name. It’s… adequate but it’s not going to win any Blog Title of the Year awards.
Late 2003 was also the time I started paying attention to web standards in a big way. It was in the middle of a big advocacy push and it was really cool to see people share all these techniques about XHTML and CSS. Web designers blogs were full of all these amazing tips and it was just so cool to be on the forefront of something like that. These skills all came in handy when I landed an internship as a web developer in 2005 whilst everything they had so far taught in school was interesting but impractical fluff. Not to say that it shouldn’t be taught but the real world has a curious tendency to fall very short of the ideal.
So far, I think box of Jack has been through at least 10 different designs, two hosts and three different blogging engines (Movable Type, Typo, WordPress). I was asked what it’d take to stop me blogging and all I could say was,
“Blogging has been that constant in my life for the longest time because I’m so connected to the internet. I spend 8 hours a day at a computer and then I go home and spend some more time on my laptop. In between, I use my phone to read the internet.”
Sure, my fire has been diluted somewhat with commercialization, Twitter, Tumblr, blog stats, lack of depression, and the sad loss of my imaginary girlfriend but I think I’ll stick around. Maybe I’ll finally get that book deal.
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