Remember The Good Old Days

I was over at the WayBack Machine today, an Internet archive of old sites, and my site was on there. So I started looking back through previous designs I had, there’s a lot of them. Looking back through the different designs I realized that I have been using WordPress for along time now. I don’t remember the exact date I started using it, but it was around November 14, 2003 according to one of my posts. Wow, I didn’t realize I was such an Old-Timer. Shows the power of WordPress though.

One of my favorite designs, other than this one of coarse, had to be the Grey Boxes design. Ahh the good old days of tables. Anyway, you can view all my old designs, there’s at least one not there, on the WayBack Machine. Note that most of the links are broken and not all images are present.

Going way back I tried to remember the many web pages on Tripod and Geocities, and I can remember putting up my very first web page on Geocities. It would have been about late 1995 early 1996, the second year of high school, and I did it all on Front Page express. That was a free M$ app that came with IE 4. It was a one page site and if I remember correctly said Welcome to Matt Read’s Site in big bold letters.

I also remember seeing another site on the net that had this amazing thing where the main section was scrolling but the nav menu wasn’t. That’s right, frames! It took me awhile just to figure out what it was, but that’s about when I started learning HTML code, to get this amazing thing to work on my site. After some basic HTML I found Javascript. Possibly the worst thing I found. Why? Because my modo then was if it looked cool do it, and you can imagine all the annoying stuff I had on my site.

After Geocities, I moved on to Tripod, which offered a CGI bin, and discovered the wonderful world of PERL. I eventually ended up writing my own guestbook tailored to Tripod, based on Matt’s, of Matt’s Script Archive, guestbook script. Then came my first design for someone else, my Dads band, Midlife Crisis. Not much but it works.

About that time is when I started using Macromedia Flash and did a complete site in Flash. It was a small cartoon town that you traveled through and discovered things about the site. It was called Cheebas Isle, and was inspired by Chilly Beach and lots of, uh, Jibbies.

After those wonderful years and many free sites, I moved on and got my own domain. I started with M*@#ble Type and quickly change to B2 then WordPress. That’s how I learned PHP and MySQL. Sorta learned anyway.

A finally we come to today, I’m writing this post on my highly customized WP blog, fluent in HTML and CSS, good with Flash, ok with PERL and pretty good with PHP. And I owe it all to the World Wide Web, and all people that took their time to make the great, free software that powered my journey. Thanks to all of them.

Now it’s time to finish my coffee and watch some MacGyver.