The year was 1993. The Cola Wars were over, Democrats were back in Congress, and my parents bought a Quadra 660AV and a 14.4 modem. Mosaic had just started using the non-standards-compliant <IMG> tag, and I was hooked. I started hand-coding HTML, not that there was any alternative. Fast-forward to 1996, when I signed up for AOL and finally had someone who could host my webpage. Those were the glory days of the Internet, when men were real men, extensions were real extensions, and loading bars were really important. The <BLINK> tag was hot shit, and I used it. A lot.
But as time went by, the Earth cooled, and things settled down. Plugins, JavaScript, MIME, and CSS made our lives easier. I migrated to .Mac, which was offering an unheard-of 100 MB of hosting space. I hand-coded The Spiffy Page until 2004, when I started using blog software to augment the static content, but the site stayed largely unchanged, an homage to a bygone era. You can still view it here. Finally, on Friday, the 13th of March, 2009, I succumbed to the inevitable and moved the hosting to GoDaddy and the back end to WordPress.
I literally grew up on the Internet, and believe me, it’s been a wild ride. But some things never change. I still edit the HTML by hand, and this site still serves the same purpose it always has: to share the things that interest me with people who probably don’t care all that much.