Ten Years of Web Pages
Last month marked the ten year anniversary of my very first web page. Hosted on National Capital FreeNet, it was one of the things I might not have gotten into if it were not free.

I recently opened up the page to do a screenshot, and was happy the HTML still worked. Most of the graphics were from the then-popular "web page collections," though I was smart enough not to fall into the animated-GIF craze. The text is corny, at the very least (hey, I was 14). I had an interesting choice of navigation menu: I would literally make .ico files in Windows, take a screenshot, and make an image map. I think I did this until there were too many icons to make it practical. It predates the Netscape-Internet Explorer war. Perhaps the most surprising discovery is that the digits.com counter is still active.

Looking at the page also reminds me that my high school was the first one in the (then) Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton to be "on" the internet. The school was brand new in late 1992, and it was immediately outfitted with an ISDN connection powered by a Gandalf box. In the pre-Mosaic and pre-Netscape days, it was actually mostly used with Gopher, though I'm too young to have witnessed that. The school board provided a Unix machine to host web pages for all of the schools. As far as I know, Trinity was the first on there as well.

Speaking of ISDN: this page was created in the short time between when I first started dialing up to FreeNet via a 14.4K modem, to when Corel provided 28.8K dial-up access. Shortly after, during the summer, Corel provided an ISDN line. That was really fun; up to 15K/s on a good day. Of course, it was only used by my father and only for business purposes (wink, wink).

Anyway, unlike most things in my life, the ten years has not flown by too quickly. It actually feels like at least a decade with this one. Maybe it's because the internet has grown and changed so much that it would be difficult for any shorter period of time to have passed.

Now, a full decade later, I still have a site. Being a minimalist, the content of the site is not a big ball of bloat. Rather, it's neatly organized and contains only original content. Part of that is a blog that's already pushing a quarter of a decade this month! The site has gone from being an overly-coloured and cliparted page, to one that was far too graphical (with mouseovers!), to one that was part of the DHTML craze, to today's relatively simple stylesheets. I wonder what the future will hold?