Site History and Related Nostalgia
Where it all Begun
Once upon a time, I wanted a homepage. I didn't really know any HTML code or anything, or what I'd fill that page with, but I wanted a homepage anyway. I had some idea that I wanted it to have a hand-drawn, sketch-like feeling. Then, when I for some reason got my hands on a trial version of Adobe Pagemill, I got started. As I didn't have access to any scanner, I drew everything in PhotoPaint instead. Pagemill did all the code, including a large image map which served as main menu. The result can be seen here and it was uploaded sometime during 1997. It started with a humble five pages, but later grew to a whopping eight pages. Together with 17 GIFs, it took up 317 kb of storage space. Hey, go easy on it, it was my first site ...
Troubles
Of course, doing any kind of update was painful, as the Pagemill trial had expired and didn't care much about whoever tried to read the code it had created. To make things even better, I had chosen to upload it to Torget, a Swedish website. They thought allowing FTP would be too great a security risk, so they forced you to do it through a web page. One file at a time. And not with the browser I used the first time I tried it. Also, filenames tended to be capitalized, and things went wrong in general every time I uploaded. Needless to say, updates were scarce and minimal, prevented by hard-to-read code and stupid update rules. Slowly, a wish for a simpler and more updatable site made its way into my mind ...
The New Style
Then, in the late summer or autumn of 1998, things got moving. With the help of various sources, I wrote a new mainpage for my site in Notepad. It had a white background and used lots of tables to display the site's links in a diagonal line from top left to bottom right. The code was unnecessarily complicated, but it worked, and I'd done it myself. The ideas for the design of this site started to gather.
The rounded corners and black background came at the same time. I had this picture in my head of a long FAQ file or whatever with clickable questions. Every question led to a separate answer page, where the answer was written in a small box with rounded corners in the middle of the page. These two ideas were incorporated into the new mainpage after a lot of troubles, no-one says progress is easy ... At this point, I definitely had the idea that I wanted the site to grow regularly, and that it would be quite text-focused.
The final steps toward this layout came when I moved the links to the different pages to a separate box left of the main one. I think I even had a sketch of how I wanted the site to look at this stage. As I wanted the site to be as easy as possible to navigate, as well as easy to expand, another box could be opened below the second to provide more menu space. I'm not sure where the copyright box came from, but it somehow felt nice to have it there. The basic site design was finished! I wrote a few documents and uploaded it all to Tripod, via FTP (what a change!).
To Eternity and Beyond
On October 6, 1998, I started the "what's new"-page and from there things are easier to follow. The thoughts-section was started on October 11, and the day by day-subsection on the 22nd. The 100 HTML-document barrier was passed on March 26, 1999, and computer games was the first real subsection of the site on May 14. Oh yeah, the arrows made their way into the menus on June 26, and after that nothing much has changed layout-wise. September 23, 1999 sees this site pass the 200-document barrier at good speed. About half a page a day, not bad eh?
Oh well, time to move on, no time for celebration. The number 300 looms at the distant horizon ...
On March 1, 2000, the up option is added to all menus, and October 1 1998 is declared official site birthday.
