A Decade on the Web
I noticed recently that my web presence has hit the decade milestone! I feel that is pretty impressive, considering just how new the Internet was to most people in 1995.
Ten years ago when I set up my first web page, the idea was more that you set up a page with the places you liked to go, and then other people could see it too. The idea of a “where I go” home page is still around, and is the focus of the “content” provided by most ISP’s today in the form of things like “MyYahoo” and such. The personal “home page” however, has morphed from a “my places” site to a public billboard to just say what you want to anyone that happens to pass by. Part of the reason for this change is search engines. Back in 1995 they were not so prevalent and certainly not so powerful.
Surfing the web meant just that. It meant starting at a page, and then jumping from one page to the next via links. By posting lots of links on your site, you helped people find things that you have found useful. There used to be huge pages of links for this and that subject that people would post on their sites. These were extremely useful for a long time. Even when search engines showed up that could spider the entire Internet, they still had a bad habit of just spitting out useless pages based on the words you searched for. Now days very few people post lists of links anymore. Some sites like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves still have sections where they try to list sites by subject, however search engines like Google have become so good that you really can just find what you want through them. We really don’t “surf” anymore, instead we “google” the Internet. Google’s ability to give you useful pages based on ranking was revolutionary for the Internet. It is funny though, that, at least as far as I understand, a lot of that ranking is based on how many people link to a site. =) I wonder if Google will ever got so popular, that no one will post links anymore and thus Google will have no way to rank sites anymore? Anyway . . .
My original site remains much as it was ten years ago at http://www.lofland.net/Lofland/ The content has changed a bit, and all of the links pages are gone, because, well because no one “surfs” anymore, and why should I update links when Google has them all? At some point I realized my site had multiple agendas, so I slapped on the main page that you see at http://www.lofland.net and put the “home page” under it. Then I added a FIAT page, pictures page and a Resume. Since then this blog was added, first as just a text file, and then later as you see it here. A webcam page has come and gone. Remember when those were “so cool?” My bulletin board/guestbook has come and gone and come again. It is brand new again now, though the content is still there.
I’ve gone through several hosting providers. Starting with my ISP (FutureNet) in 1995, then my employer, then a buddy of mine, then back and forth between him, my home over DSL, and a lousy provider, and back to my friend’s server before just this month moving to DreamHost.
So anyway, this is just my rambling post to brag about ten years on the ‘net. It isn’t really a big deal to anyone but me, but it is fun to think about.
