In late 1996, or maybe 1997, I discovered Geocities. At that point I realised I didn’t just have read the endless vacuous monotony of the web…. I could contribute to it.

Next, the University I was at at the time announced they would allow students to have their own web space on the University site. Some would describe this as ‘Gutsy’. I created a whole set of pages, more a maze. Random words linking to unrelated pages with confiusing urls. I think I was trying to be arty. I was not.

When I lived off campus, and signed up to an ISP, they too gave me public web space. It would have be rude to say no.

After (barely) graduating I was running a real web server, that people actually used. Didn’t stop me signed up to blogger.com - which while short lived did come in handy in a couple of years later when those using blogger got early beta access to this new thing called gmail. I’ve got my own name @ gmail.com suckers!

And a little after that I signed up for new hosting and a domain name. nostuff.org. And installed Wordpress. It started off mostly as random ‘hey I’ve just found this link!!’ - twitter was some way off. But over time, more words were written, some longer ones - some even with half an idea/thought. Some logged my adventures in trying technical things. Many logged - ’live blogged’ events I went to for work. As was the fashion in academia at the time. Nearly all are an embarrassment.

Which begs the question, why are they still here?

I decided I had enough of Wordpress. I didn’t need a php/mysql web app for what was essentially a static (I was fooling myself that tomorrow I would write some more) website. An extension I had installled would email me each time someone tried to login (ie hack) the website (and many years ago they had succeeded, I know because many old posts had dodgy links randomly added to them). With various migrations and technical changes over the years, links to things like images had broken.

So I exported out of Wordpress in to Hugo, a static site generator (they were cool ten years ago, so standard form I am now just getting in to it).

Herre you will find those blog posts. They serve to capture a snapshot of history from a very particular hazzy lens. Should you stumble in to them, may I remind you I’m a better person now.