It's weird to think, but this year marks 25 years of having some form of Internet home page. It all started with Geocities as a portfolio showcasing work from art school. Then, my site moved to Tripod where I tried making a web comic. And then to its home here at theschlock.com posting game reviews and photos.
Lately, I came across some of my old pages, and I wanted to find a way to surface them again. The actual content is too personal (or problematic), so I couldn't surface the pages in their original form, so I decided to reuse the old designs with all the posts currently available on the site.
Prior to the current version of the site, I would count 8 distinct versions of my home pages over 4 clear eras of experimentation and learning. FYI, not all the links on these pages are available.
Geocities Era / Microsoft Frontpage
Version 0 - Art Portfolio (2000, or 1999?)
Tripod Era / Microsoft Frontpage
Version 1 - Original Version (June 12th 2000 - April 2002)
Version 2 - Updated Version (April 2002 - January 2003)
Domain Era / Macromedia Dreamweaver
Version 3 - Experimental Photo Version (January 2003 - February 2003)
Version 4 - Clean Photo Version (February 2003 - August 2003)
Version 5 - Framed Photo Version (August 2003 - June 2005)
Version 6 - Movable Type (August 2003 - August 2006)
Wordpress Era
Version 7 - Wordpress (August 2006 - March 2014)
Current Era
Version 8 - Tapestry / Java (March 2014 - present)
The Internet was an absolute marvel to me. Everyone was spreading out on the net and carving their own corner of it for themselves. Everyone had their own website for their art, for their stupid movies, for their forums, for their ideas. I was in art school, so I wanted to be like all the other artists online, showcasing their stuff. Too bad I was a terrible artist.
I had no idea how to actual make a webpage. I don't remember the details, but it seems like I downloaded Microsoft Frontpage, which generated the code of my original pages, and put together a design based on other pages I liked. Geocities and Tripod offered free hosting, so I put it there and linked to other people's pages.
Version 0 - Art Portfolio (Geocities, 2000)
Version 1 - Original Version (June 12th 2000 - April 2002)
Version 2 - Updated Version (April 2002 - January 2003)
(Note: I am unable to retrieve any Geocities data at this time, so I'll try to revisit it later.)
After art school, I went to a real school and started learning programming. I started meeting more people who also cared about making an online presence for themselves.
November 2002 was when I bought theschlock.com. Also, for that Christmas, I got my first digital camera, and starting taking tons of photos. I wanted to make a site that used my photography more in its design and showcased photos. I started going to more clubs, and wanted to put those photos online, too. I started thinking about having a multipage design, rather than a single landing page with links.
I found Macromedia Dreamweaver online which was WAY more user friendly than Frontpage. I could actually edit things in a design view and move them around. It gave me more freedom. This really helped me develop a sense of web-design. I still had yet to fully understand HTML, but Dreamweaver had both design views and code views, so I could watch the code change as I moved things around. After a while, I could take off the training wheels and write the code myself.
Version 3 - Experimental Photo Version (January 2003 - February 2003)
Version 4 - Clean Photo Version (February 2003 - August 2003)
Version 5 - Framed Photo Version (August 2003 - June 2005)
I messed around with some designs and eventually landed on the last one.
By the time I landed on that last design, I was living with friends and fellow students who were in web development at school. They also made their own websites, and quite knowledgable about all things Internet. Blogging software started becoming an actual business, and people had begun transitioning from completely custom hobbyist sites into Blogs.
Technology had changed too. Making website updates was no longer about directly editing HTML and uploading it. The underlying database would hold all the data, and software running on the server would generate the page. I didn't fully understand this. I had really only just grasped the top layer of web-dev.
One of my friends loved Movable Type, so I installed it on theschlock.com from his recommendation. I used it in tandem with the Framed version of the site. Moveable Type would handle all the long posts about games and whatever. The Framed version was updated with photos and pictorials.
Version 6 - Movable Type (August 2003 - August 2006)
I used this site through the remainder of college.
Nearing the end of college, the Internet and blogging had matured. My site design was pretty "old" for the Internet and MovableType wasn't totally user-friendly to use. By then, Wordpress completely overtook all of independent blogging.
Prior to studying abroad in Japan, I downloaded my entire site locally and zipped it. I installed Wordpress on theschlock.com, which completely took over. Wordpress was WAY more user friendly than Movable Type, and I could easily write about everything I was doing in Japan, and show all my photos, too.
Version 7 - Wordpress (August 2006 - March 2014)
I choose the design from a template, but then changed it slightly to be different. Not all that much, though.
After graduating, I still continued to use it. Working as a developer, I learned so much about using Java to manage and maintain websites, but I never had the headspace to use it on any personal projects. I had the time, but I already spent all day thinking about websites at work. I needed to decompress at home.
That brings us to the current version of the site.
While Wordpress was far more user-friendly than my previous versions, it didn't feel special. It didn't feel like it was mine. Wordpress used PHP at the time, which I never liked. PHP feel far too loose and I couldn't understand it.
I had always wanted to remake everything from scratch and have complete control over everything on the site in a more modern capacity. I had started laying some initial groundwork in 2012. But then, after moving to Japan and settling in, I finally had the headspace to execute on my ideas completely. I knew exactly what I wanted and exactly how to make what I wanted.
I wrote about all this in the first post on this version of the site on March 4th, 2014 as the site went live for the first time. Around 2 months later, the full design was complete. I wrote about that here.
Version 8 - Current (March 2014 - now)
It was the site I had always wanted. I had complete control over everything on the site, and it was extensible enough to have new things over time.
Running an active website isn't all that easy, though. It was always going down after a couple of days. I kept up with it for nearly 3 years. Then, one day, when I checked on it, the site was gone. Deleted from my host. My host had dropped support, so that was the end of that service.
2 years ago, with renewed programming interest, I finally brought the site back online, nearly 9 years after its initial launch. I posted about it on March 9th 2023.
Now, the online version of my site is a generated mess of static HTML files. Because of this, there should no longer ever be any problems with hosting in the future. There's nothing running on the host, nor any database it's pulling from. It is free from any technical problems.
This design has changed and been refined a little bit over the years, but I doubt there will ever be another complete redesign of the site. The design still holds all the key values I want for written online content, and it's easy for me to add new things and change them.
Although... Now that I have a framework for displaying my blogging content with different designs, I could experiment with new designs and see if anything sticks. Or, I could design terrible versions of my site in the same way that much of the blogging sites have turned into.
Revisiting many of these old pages has given me some new ideas, too, so stay tuned. :)