I was browsing through my university files the other day and – lo and behold - I found the very first website I ever built. It was part of a university course I did and I remember clearly having written this thing solely in notepad. No JavaScript, no CSS just plain old HTML(4).

This site is such a piece of timeless junk that I thought I might as well share it with you.

Welcome to my Website

So let me introduce you to wolfgang.neocities.org.

This site really has it all, to make you feel like it's 1999 all over again.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting contemporary witness of how late 90’s personal websites looked like. All the gruesome stuff was there – I obviously did my worst:

• First, it's hosted on Neocities and since it originally had been hosted on GeoCities (which is not around anymore), I figured Neocities was the appropriate place for it.
• It has an eye-soring, repeating-tile background image.
• There are many broken links.
• It comes with the ubiquitous under construction sign.
• And it has - of course - a <TABLE>! Featuring colspan and rowspan people!

Nevertheless and quite surprisingly, this site brought up a couple of interesting facts about myself, or rather about my “1999, just out of school, university-freshman self”:

• I chose a creepy interesting picture of myself. Let’s blame this on bad lighting conditions and poor scanners (yes, we had to scan analog photos back than).
• My favorite search engine at that time apparently was InferenceFind. I cannot even remember using it and it’s not around any more. I do remember though, a friend of mine telling me to "go and give Google try, because they apparently have quite a good search engine".
• I was way into genetics and microbiology at that time.
• Obviously, I wasn't "not satisfied with the result" this webpage looked and had planned to improve it over the next couple of weeks. Ahem ... that was 1999, so I guess I am a bit behind schedule on that.
• Interestingly, my choice of favorite movies (Pulp Fiction, Matrix, Alien), music (Beastie Boys) and books (Douglas Adams) did not change much over the last 15 years.

What has changed?

Thinking back, I actually liked building writing this kind of web sites then. This was shortly before DHTML and JavaScript entered the scene and the browser wars descended on us. Back then, it basically came down to creating and publishing some (admittedly terrible looking) HTML pages, that would render more or less the same on each browser.

But shortly after that, things went horribly wrong and web developers and designers had to pull off all these crazy tricks to make web sites look the same on different browsers. Those were the times when I literally starting hating and despising web development, not touching any HTML for about 10 years.

Today it feels more like these early area again in terms of things working more or less equally on current browsers. Minus the horrible looks, plus all the cool interactive stuff we got with HTML and CSS3.

"The web and I have been on a long break, but we are back together for a few years now."