I made my first website when I was in middle school. My family had just gotten AOL, and I was thrilled. The internet was huge that year. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were hanging out and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, along with all my friends. AIM was the killer app, but I was more taken with another feature: each AOL user was allotted 2 megabytes of hosted webspace. The “Personal Publisher” software they provided to build your site was total garbage—I remember that by default, any <img> inside of an anchor tag had a thick border that looked clunky. But you could also edit your page’s source code directly. Suddenly I had the same power to build pages that any professional “web designer” did. The bar was not high then, and I was full of eighth-grade hubris.
I’m glad my early masterpiece no longer survives. On one hand I recall I did some clever things with gif animations. On the other hand, I think I made liberal use of the Papyrus font.
I’ve been thinking about all of this after reading this recent article on the Verge about “the year of missing photos.” The premise of the piece is that 2004 was a transition year from film to digital cameras, and the online platforms that were popular then for storing photos are gone or dying. Below you’ll find the one photo I have surviving in my personal library from 2004.
There’s plenty I wish I had not lost. My Peace Corps blog from the early 2010’s, for instance, did not survive Blogger’s purchase by Google. Then four years ago when the pandemic and parental leave descended simultaneously, I decided to roll my own website from scratch. I wanted to learn Node.js, and set out to build a whole website engine using express. I was pleased with the result, but ended up spending all my time futzing with the internals, and the actual blog mechanism remained unused.
So now I’m trying again, learning from everything I tried before. I decided to go with a static site generator for many reasons:
- I can control how things look and optimize the organization without wasting a lot of time mucking around with API calls or server settings
- All of my content lives in future-proof markdown files that are easy to backup and preserve
- I can self-host and avoid the problem that arose with Photobucket and Blogger
- I can use my preferred editor (vim) to compose content
I’m glad I can now direct my energy toward some of the other projects I have in mind. As I pull those together, I’ll be able to write about them here. Plus anything else that’s on my mind :)