Chapter 1: Another Website

Above is a screenshot of the homepage from my first website (now defunct). It was developed sometime in late 1993/early 1994 and was hosted on a server of the Department of Computer Science at Aberystwyth University (at the time, University of Wales, Aberystwyth).

Hand coded HTML was written on Sun SPARC stations in the Vi editor. Images were developed in DrawPerfect and massaged into web friendly formats in an early version of Paint Shop Pro.

It’s all come a long way since then. At the day job, I still hand code our website, although these days it’s in ColdFusion (yeah, it’s still used in strange remote places of the web), using Dreamweaver.

I’ve had several personal websites since that first version. I’ve created them in ASP, ColdFusion, Blogger, WordPress, and probably other things I’ve long since forgot.

For my latest personal site I didn’t want to have to brain anything. Squarespace seems to be the de facto standard for creative-oriented-portfolio-personal spaces, so here I am.

I have some reservations about the system. I’m a bit worried about how they manage uploaded images. There’s some nebulous cloud storage system in place that seems to hang onto files even after you’ve removed them from your site. That’s a bit of a concern when it comes to making sure your work doesn’t end up in the “wrong hands”.

My plan is to create new Chapters for photo trips and other things I deem worthy of writing about. I’m not the greatest diarist, so these could be few and far between. Whenever they do appear, it’s be nice to think that someone may find them moderately interesting.

- S