About

a log of links, thoughts, notes and scribbles.

Stuff I’ve seen. Things I’ve read. Places I’ve been.

I’ve also reposted my old blog archive. I started a weblog back in 2001 and, at last count, I had 815 posts.

So, here it all is.

It’s mainly for my benefit, but you’re welcome to wander around and see what I’ve been up to.

I’ve been online, in one form or another, since 1996 and started playing around with webpages and HTML in ’98.

One of the first things I ever put online was a basic picture gallery. I scanned the images from a book and built a rudimentary website.

I found some free web space and put it all together with Microsoft Frontpage 3 and an early version of Photoshop.

my very first website. a picture gallery of nested tables, drop shadows, and clunky navigation buttons.

At the time, I was doing a postgrad degree and worked in the university IT department to fund my studies. We had a drawer full of software and unrestricted access to the Janet network. So we enjoyed high-speed internet when the rest of the world was on telephone dial-up.

That summer, we played, downloaded, figured out how things worked, messed about with software, uploaded, experimented, made mistakes, and learned loads about how that crazy new thing called the internet worked.

We felt like pioneers. I loved it.

I remember looking at my new picture gallery on my flimsy home dial-up connection – a not-so-lightening-fast 33.6bps fax modem 👉

It took forever to download the images, a painful pixel-by-pixel crawl.

I soon learnt about optimising images, web-safe colours, and browser compatibility.

Those were the heady days of Windows 98, Netscape Navigator, Winamp and chatting on ICQ.

I remember seeing Flash animations for the very first time and thinking how groundbreaking it was.

Filesharing was huge. We ripped music CDs and traded MP3s on random FTP servers – if you uploaded 3, you could download 5 !

By 2001, I started blogging.

writingonthewall.org was my first attempt at a weblog, as they were then known.

I set it up on a free server and it ran quite happily on an early version of moveabletype. It was very basic.

In 2004, I bought a hosting account, gave it an overhaul, and renamed it greasy-spoon.org. Not sure why, but it seemed a good idea at the time.

In 2007, I moved over to WordPress and got into the habit of posting more frequently.

Here’s what it looked like by 2012:

In 2013 I took it offline and, for a decade or so, it lived in a cupboard on an old backup disk.

I’d kinda forgotten about it, but then stumbled across it when I went through some old archives looking for something else.

So, I’ve decided to reincarnate my old posts and try to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly.

wish me luck.