I found a 2002 version of my first website on the Wayback Machine. It’s a copy they received from the web crawler Alexa Internet. (I don’t think I even knew the Internet Archive existed back then.) I wrote the simple HTML, probably with BBEdit Lite, and posted it to the iDisk account I had with Apple. The interesting part about the site for me now is the collection of teaching links I placed on one page. Back then, however, I only indicated its presence with links in a small font size in the footer.

Soon after, I used Dreamweaver to create a more involved website, but not much of that effort has survived. Here’s a welcome page from 2003 without the CSS and scripts. I didn’t keep up the Dreamweaver approach because it was far too involved for my purposes.

By 2006, at the latest, it seems I had learned to not use tables, but I have no idea why. After all, touch screen phones were not a thing yet.

Later the site evolved into a wiki, which I produced by simply exporting a VoodooPad wiki to a folder of HTML files using VoodooPad’s built-in functionality. Here’s a version from 2008. Unfortunately, not all of it was archived, and I suspect not all of my VoodooPad files have survived either.

The previous 2008 link leads to a page that lists blogs I have long since discontinued. The stuff I did on Blogger was not crawled and archived (maybe because Google wasn’t sharing its crawling the way Alexa did?). By contrast, some parts of my old WordPress and Tumblr sites seem to have been archived, though usually no more than a couple pages at a time. That said, I already integrated some of those posts into this iteration of my site.

When Apple announced it was closing down iDisk in 2012, I bought my domain and turned one of my WordPress blogs into my main home. Gone was my simple Wiki. VoodooPad never transitioned successfully to iOS anyway, and its new owner has had a hard time keeping up the pace of development. People complain about subscription models, but their absence can lead to the death of beloved apps.

My engagement on Twitter accompanied much of this activity. Some people gave up on blogging completely as a consequence of that platform. l’m glad I didn’t.