When I was an undergrad in the early 90's, the Internet hadn't quite hit its stride yet. It was a time of experimentation and discovery. You could totally sense the potential even if you couldn't quite name it yet. As I look at the explosion in AI today, I can't help but feel similarly. Thinking about this put me in a nostalgic mood, and I started to wonder how far back I could look to find my Internet presence.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to pinpoint my first Web published content to February of 1998. My first Web content is just over 27 years old! That was a really long time ago. Looking at it, I have so many questions for my younger self: Why did I decide to call my site Hazelware? Why did I force a television styled interface onto the navigation? How did I create the navigation graphics? Why does the default landing page feature the disgraced duo of Milli Vanilli?

I wish I could remember more about how I constructed it all, but I do remember why I created it. Every morning when I turned my computer on and logged onto the Internet, I wanted to have a convenient place to go to check all my "daily content." This included online comics, the latest Letterman Top 10 list, any new blog posts by other developers that I followed, and other frequently updated sites that I cared about.

But what about my first blog? I remembered that I eventually tired of having just a collection of links and I got interested in the new weblogs. So, I decided to create my own blogging software on a Linux server in my basement running on an Apache web server and serving content up via PHP – the classic "LAMP" stack. I had never written PHP before so the entire exercise was both educational and fun. This was also still fairly early in terms of blog design, UX and functionality so a lot of what I did was simply copying other designs that I came across adhoc.

This is my little home on the web. I've started to use it as a place to collect some of the things that I have learned and done in regards to programming. Be sure to check out the tutorials as well as the extensive links section.

Submitted on Wednesday the 14th of August 2002, at 08:46
Again, thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to find my very first weblog post: Wednesday, August 14th, 2002. Honestly, I don't think the design on this looks all that bad. Definitely a little dated, but I wouldn't call it embarrassing.

I've since managed to recover most of my old blog content and have been able to give them a home here on Micro.blog. If you're curious, you can browse my older posts on this page. There is still a gap from the original posts in 2002 until I was able to rescue the content in March of 2004, but looking through the missing posts, I'm not missing too much.

So there you have it. I've been blogging for just shy of 23 years, and I fortunately have most of the content backed up. That's honestly a great feeling. I love being able to peek back and see what younger me was thinking or interested in. I've not always been the most consistent blogger, but I'm glad that I've kept at it.