The danblanks.com website debuted Internet July 14, 1998, back when the Internet was nothing but stone knives and bearskin rugs.
Okay, the official “birthdate” of the Internet is listed as 1983. So the Internet had been around for a while. But was it useful to the average Joe? No, it was not. It was only used by academics and geeks who knew how to log into user groups catering to various areas of interest. You could post messages on user groups of all kinds–music, art, movies, and, of course, kinky stuff. But there was no such thing as “web browsing” or posting pictures or doing Goggle searches.
The Internet didn’t come into widespread use in the public until the development of two essential components. One was the creation of the HTML language. This amazing innovation was powerful enough to display text and pictures while simple enough that a 12-year-old could write webpage content. Well, a smart 12-year-old, but there are plenty of those in the world.
The other essential development was the web browser. I consider the web browser to be one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. It made it possible for anyone with almost no technical skill to access websites.
The first widely useable web browser was Mosaic written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in 1993.
It was clunky and a bit ugly, but it worked. It didn’t take long for more powerful alternatives to Mosaic to surface, in particular Mozilla, which came out in 1998, and Netscape soon thereafter.
Just as importantly. anyone writing a website could distribute their content across the entire free world. That’s a heady thing to consider. It used to be you had to be in some position of power, either via wealth or political position, to have the ability to be heard around the entire planet. Now, children can do it. It’s amazing. I don’t think the younger generation have a full appreciation of the power and responsibility they now possess.
Anyway, it was into that environment in 1998 that I obtained the danblanks.com domain name and started my website. Here is an image of my first webpage on danblanks.com:
Other than my resume, I posted a What’s New webpage:
Whew! The good old days! No picture galleries and very primitive menus.
Employment was my initial reason to have my own website. I wanted to move on from my job at Raytheon and felt having my own website would impress prospective employers. Nowadays, it may seem a silly way to impress people, but running your own website was a much bigger deal in the Netscape-dominated pre-Google days of 1998.
Getting my own domain name was expensive and a lot of trouble. At the time, a company named Network Solutions had a nice little racket. A few years before, they had wheedled a government contract that gave them ownership and control over all of the domain names. The contract didn’t seem to be a big deal–until it was. This Prince of Darkness company charged a small fortune for the initial purchase of a domain name and ongoing charges for its continued use. To pour salt in the wound, they provided terrible service. Fortunately, this monopoly finally ended and other providers were allowed to provide and maintain domain names in a competitive market. At my first opportunity, I changed my domain registration over to Bluehost and have been with them ever since.
Before putting my own website together, I had already constructed a website within Texas Instruments (and later Raytheon) to show off the NEMO program, a NanoElectronic Modelling Simulator for which I wrote the graphical user interface. The website is long gone, but I learned a lot from putting it together.
Eventually, I did a new update of the website using Dreamweaver, a website builder that had some nifty features you couldn’t easily duplicate with other systems at the time. The website evolved into this form:
It may not look too spiffy now, but it the early 2000’s it was the state-of-the-art for a homegrown website.
I did a pretty good job of maintaining my website until the advent of more advanced social media sites like Facebook. Then it became sooooo easy to succumb to temptation and always post content there. I was older, more tired, and more pressed for time. The danblanks.com website fell into relative disuse.
Now that I’m retired, I have more time on my hands. It’s time to update the site once again. Dreamweaver was out of consideration. Other methodologies have caught up with and surpassed the old Dreamweaver way of making a website.
But what to switch to? There is a confusingly diverse alphabet soup of website builders. All of them have advantages and disadvantages. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to use WordPress for the website update. Bluehost made it easy as it provides WordPress services as a part of the package. The popularity of WordPress was a big part of my decision making process. About 40% of commercial websites use WordPress, more than any other single technology. It may seem to be a bit long in the tooth, but WordPress isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
That’s where I’m at (and you are at) right now, in a WordPress world. Maybe I will live long enough that WordPress is passe and I need to pick some other superior technology. Maybe AI bots will take over all of the website writing for us. Maybe AI will just take over us. Stay tuned.
Let me know in the comments if you find any problems with the website or have any suggestions on how to improve it. Thanks!