Wayback challenge: When was your first site?
While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.
The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.
The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.
Back in 1996 I used an HPUX system, a text editor, as well as the Mosaic browser and a beta version of Netscape to design the site. By 1997, I had use of Microsoft's Frontpage to design and manage the site.
So again, what was the first Web page that you authored for the Internet? What was the first site that you authored with a content management system? Inquiring minds at CMSReport.com want to know!
About this CMS Enthusiast
Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government.
Comments
#1 1995
The first site I did was behind the firewall. It was an intranet site in early 1995. The oldest wayback link I can find is for December 1996 for World Drug Store: http://web.archive.org/web/19961223014316/http://worlddrug.com/ . There's a couple of older public sites, too, but they're not in the archive.
#2 My first page
the wayback machine has a snapshot of a bio page I originally made on CNN.com's intranet in late 95 or early 96 - their snapshot is from 98. http://web.archive.org/web/20001017231013/way.nu/Jonathan/index.html I kept it as a bio page on way.nu for several years after than, while I was maintaining IT with manual HTML coding of the content section with navigation maintained with a set of nested server side includes.
The manual HTML part was replaced by Blogger at the end of 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/20010720070539/http://way.nu/ and later by MovableType and then WordPress
#3 How about forum / newsgroup postings?!
#4 Background Image
#5 The female touch
By 1998, the hideous background was removed, but don't look at me for this smart move. In 1998 the Webmaster became a team between myself and a female coworker. That coworker helped introduced me to the need of paying attention to more than just content, but also design and color.
Just look at the current design for CMS Report (yuck) and you can tell, I still have a lot to learn. My talents have always been more as system admin guy than a designer or developer...
#6 Oldest Site
#7 Jurassic Punk circa 1996
#8 Infotech is my first site
#9 HTMLHelp.com - 12/1996
#10 1 of 300,000
Hey John, I recognize your site. I recognize at least the early versions of it, but I don't recall visiting it in recent years. I'd also bet I found your site on Webcrawler which was the search engine at the time. Of course it wasn't long after that for Yahoo to come and grab the spotlight.
#11 interesting
#12 dibbs this one
#13 Just A Lil' Toy Store