The first version of this site went online in April 1999.
It was made on a laptop that I had on loan from my employer, which had Netscape 3 and Explorer 3 on it. It was entirely built in HTML 3.2, which I had taught myself from a manual. The site was hand-coded mainly in Wordpad, with the occasional use of Notepad, and I tested it in both browsers.
It didn't use web-safe colours. Seeing it on a monitor that only rendered the web-safe colours was a bit of a shock: the two shades of tan turned in to pink and grey. Not such a bad combination, but still a nasty surprise.
This version of the site lived on free webspace provided by Fortune City
(
Fortune City). At that particular time Fortune City was a good place to have a website. You were required to display a banner on each web page, but it was allowed to move it to the bottom of the page; and around the message boards there was a thriving community, where people helped eachother building websites and just hung out. I discovered that I enjoyed looking at people's web pages and helping them solve technical problems. It wasn't long before I spent at least an hour a day on the message boards.
In case you're interested, the Egyptian graphic shown on the page was linkware from Neferchichi's Tomb
(
Neferchichi's Tomb).
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